As our second term begins, we are very happy to announce some exciting updates to our strategic vision and plans for the future.
Recap of 2024
2024 was a year of exceptional achievement. Above all, we welcomed our inaugural founding class. We hired 18 new faculty and 25 new staff. We hit a fundraising high of $214 million. Following the recruitment of Shez Shafiq to our leadership team, we achieved a major consolidation of our finances. We were featured very positively on 60 Minutes. We saw a strong start to our second admissions cycle.
On behalf of the entire board, we are very grateful for the dedication and incredibly hard work that the UATX team—leadership, faculty, and staff—have put in to achieve such a strong and positive start to what we believe is the most exciting story in higher education today.
And we also want to pay tribute to our extraordinary inaugural class. From the moment they set foot on campus, they have embodied the spirit of fearless inquiry that defines UATX.
We have achieved more success than most people ever imagined would be possible in this short amount of time: less than three and a half years. We are so pleased that this successful foundation allows us to be even more ambitious, and more expansive, as we look forward to the next chapter for UATX.
Vision for 2025 and Beyond
We are here not just to build a great new college in Austin, but also to reinvent American higher education for the 21st century as profoundly as Chicago and Stanford did when they were founded more than a century ago—and to grow as rapidly as they did, to become competitors with and influencers of the established northeastern Ivy League institutions.
We are reaffirming the fearless pursuit of truth as the core purpose of a university, and the indispensable roles of academic freedom and meritocracy in that mission. At the same time, we are seeking to create a new kind of university for a new era: one that is more interdisciplinary, more creative in its use of information technology, and more connected to the world of practice and application.
We have some great new initiatives to propel us forward this year.
This year will see the launch of our Distinguished Visiting Scholars program. On a regular basis, eminent figures in academia will come to Austin to spend time with us and our students. Each visiting scholar will participate in filmed discussions with our faculty and student audience. The resulting videos will lay the foundation for UATX as the go-to place for intellectual and academic content online.
2025 will also be the year when, with support from some of our most important donors, we shall begin to recruit some of the world’s leading scholars to join our faculty on a full-time basis. Our concept is to begin by inviting eminent thinkers to spend an initial term in residence with us. Our goal will be to persuade them to stay longer and ultimately to join us here permanently.
Finally, we hope this year or next—as soon as we are permitted to offer graduate degrees—to launch a new master’s degree in entrepreneurship.
There is much work to be done if we are to realize all these ambitions. We are embarking on the path from academic startup to fully-fledged university, able to compete for intellectual talent at the highest level by the end of the decade, and to scale by a factor of at least five, if not ten.
The Chancellor – Elevating Our Voice
We recognize that to accomplish our goals we will need more actors and voices at the top—leaders who can represent the University to broader communities and amplify our voice and impact in the debates that are currently going on within and about higher education. As we grow, we must address the reality that we need another officer alongside the President to represent the University.
To that end, we will appoint a Chancellor, modeled on the equivalent position at Oxford, whose role it will be to preside over major University events; provide advice, guidance, and support to the University; serve as an ambassador for the University at local, national, and international events; and undertake fundraising and advocacy work to fulfill the University’s mission.
President Pano Kanelos has graciously accepted our offer to be elevated to this role at the end of the current academic year. The University could have no better representative, advocate, leader, ambassador or advisor. Over the past three years, he has become a leading voice for those across the country who are hungry for change in higher education, for civility on our campuses, and for rigor in our classrooms.
Pano has been a partner, architect, creator, builder, and true founder of the University. We owe him a debt of gratitude for making possible what we celebrate today. The Board will shortly launch a process to find a worthy successor as President who can live up to the legacy Pano has created. As we begin this search, we will of course be inviting and welcoming thoughts and ideas from members of this community.
Concluding Thoughts
Our 2025 mission must be to continue to innovate in every respect, from the way we teach and assess teaching quality, to the way we run our disciplinary process, down to the way, at our Union, our undergraduates learn to debate the most contentious issues of the day.
We remain inspired by what we have achieved and even more by what we can achieve in the future.
We thank everyone at UATX for their dedication to the fearless pursuit of truth, to this marvelous University, and to our shared mission. It is hugely important, and we are very, very proud to be part of it.
Niall Ferguson
Joe Lonsdale
January 10, 2025
