University of Austin

UATX founding faculty Boris Fishman's review of Aleksandr Skorobogatov's novel "Russian Gothic" was published Saturday in The New York Times. "The Soviet-Afghan war comes up only once in RUSSIAN GOTHIC, a slim novel by the Belarus-born Aleksandr Skorobogatov that first appeared in 1991 and has just been published in translation in the United States. But that single, radioactive reference transforms our experience of the story from a private disturbance to a commentary on a nation." https://lnkd.in/es9h3j3A

Assistant Professor of Theology Ryan Haecker completed his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Dr. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Says Dr. Haecker of UATX: "We have an amazing opportunity here to explore the questions of theology in a way that is neither prescribed in advance by certain denominational doctrines nor suppressed by an anxiety of impoliteness that often accompanies our secular culture, where religion is pushed to the margins. At the University of Austin, we can ask big questions and explore them with a passionate intensity." Read more from Dr. Haecker: https://lnkd.in/eZvk2S5z

Happy Independence Day! Because a free nation requires free thinkers, all UATX students will study foundational texts of the American regime. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eq7e8hX5

"The Supreme Court has taken back the authority of judges to weigh evidence and decide if regulators have defined the terms of laws accurately and the conditions they regulate honestly. Legislators now have greater incentive to make decisions in the name of voters without defaulting on their responsibilities to bureaucrats. Accountability lies where it belongs with elected representatives, overseen by courts." -- Dean of Economics, Politics & History Morgan Marietta in The Spectator World. https://lnkd.in/eAC43FaG

Congratulations to new founding faculty David Puelz, Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science, whose article on the limitations of compartmental model forecasts during COVID-19 was published this month in Frontiers. Dr. Puelz is a Bayesian statistician and professor working at the intersection of computational data analysis and machine learning. He writes and researches on economics, the social sciences, and applied artificial intelligence. From the article: "Given the wide use of compartmental models to describe the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 and other diseases, we must carefully consider their limitations when using them to inform public health interventions. In particular, homogeneity assumptions underlying these models do not accurately reflect heterogeneity of the population, and estimates of key parameters ... are often noisy and unreliable. In addition, these models do not account for the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions on disease transmission or capture the complex interactions between the virus, people, and the environment." https://lnkd.in/ertAkrrF

What does ideological tyranny do to the bodies and characters of individual human beings? Take another look inside the UATX curriculum with "Inside Intellectual Foundations," our weekly blog series on the courses students will take in their first two years. Today, we're introducing "Ideological Experiments of the 20th Century," a core class introducing students to Rousseau, Marx, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and much, much more. https://lnkd.in/edbxx-FW

Congratulations and welcome, Erin Valdez!

Dean of Arts & Letters Patrick Gray's article "Shakespeare and Morality"  is now the most-read of the past year in the British journal Shakespeare, published by Routledge under the auspices of the THE BRITISH SHAKESPEARE ASSOCIATION. It is available to read via open access. From the article: "For glib ‘gotcha’ commentators such as [John] Stewart, the political ‘other’ is not an occasion for curiosity, good-faith questions, and earnest argumentation but instead for sneers, jibes, and performative disdain. Shakespeare’s plays, by contrast, are more like the old show Crossfire: ‘dialectical engagement between ideological opponents.' Partisanship can be a form of ‘collaboration,' if we are willing to listen to each other with open minds." Read more: https://lnkd.in/edsBgN_6

UATX Provost Jake Howland on how UATX reimagined faculty hiring—with enormous success. https://lnkd.in/eF9nncK6

I stopped by the Spectator yesterday while in London to talk with Freddy Gray about antisemitism and the University of Austin. https://lnkd.in/gQKaewud