University of Texas, Austin report

I visited University of Texas’s Austin campus last month. They seem to have about $10 billion in physical infrastructure, $20 billion in the bank, and the ability to tax 32 million people any time that they want more money. It is tough to understand how private universities, except for Harvard and the other Queers for Palestine League schools, can compete.

The buildings are beautiful and beautifully maintained.

First stop was the Ransom Center, home to a Gutenberg Bible and the Niépce Heliograph (1827), perhaps the earliest surviving photo. The special exhibit was of a collection of Saturday Night Live and related memorability from Lorne Michaels (a.k.a. “Lorne Lipowitz”):

In reviewing the memos among NBC network executives and producers, it is remarkable how many of them had Jewish last names. That era is apparently over. From “The Vanishing” (2023):

… a decade ago there were 22 Jews on The Hollywood Reporter’s annual list of the Top 50 Showrunners. In 2022, that’s down to 13. Other than the half-Jewish (and already famous) Maggie Gyllenhaal, you’d have to go back six years to find a single Jew on Variety’s annual list of 10 Directors to Watch.

Thanks to the odious new Hollywood house style that requires a detailed ethnic and racial classification at the top of all capsule biographies, we can see just how many self-identified Jews are in the Sundance writers and directors labs, or the NBC, Paramount, and Disney writers and apprenticeship programs—it is zero. It seems not being Jewish is actually a primary qualification. So much for Jewish control of Hollywood.

The school got some of Bill Gates’s money before it was all shipped to Africa (all without ever being taxed, since the appreciated stock was given to a tax-exempt foundation) and Sol LeWitt managed to harvest some of it.

I visited a friend on the faculty whose door is adorned with a diversity and inclusion sticker:

The publicly-funded school apparently sponsored a “Women and Gender Minorities in Computing Research Day”:

I don’t understand how this is possible at a taxpayer-funded school that is supposed to comply with the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. It wouldn’t be acceptable to have a “men-only” computer nerdism day, right?

I don’t understand why these ardent Democrats stay in Texas and pay taxes every day to a government whose principles, e.g., abortion care restrictions, they say they oppose. Maybe it would be a step down in status to take a job at a Cal State university, for example, but wouldn’t that be a moral upgrade?

Speaking of morals, an on-campus church reminds visitors that “atheist” and Rainbow Flag worship are part of a “Christian community”:

The haters across the street at the business school falsely claim that “The family is the foundation upon which the world of business is built, and it is a vital force in the local, state and national economy” and hatefully display an apparent cisgender heterosexual couple with their artisanally-produced child.

Speaking of false claims, folks at UT reject the false claim that SARS-CoV-2 has been defeated. Outdoor maskers was reasonably common:

The university includes its own art museum.

The restrooms are for “everyone”, but non-Latinos need not apply for inclusion in a significant-sized gallery:

It’s an established fact that Asian women are victimized be being “fetishized” and “undervalued”:

Black Americans are victims of “continued injustice and violence”:

(The King of Hate (Grok) says that more than 90 percent of the murderers of Black Americans are… Black Americans (source: FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program).)

The 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is victimized and “marginalized”. Sign: “Neel painted Bourdon and Battcock, two well-known New York art critics and a romantic couple at the time, in an era when very few people were openly gay in the United States.” In other words, they were hated so much that they were forced to make a living by getting checks from publishers for their opinions about art and they were denied the opportunity to work in a widget factory. According to Wikipedia, Gregory Battcock “was murdered at his vacation home in San Juan, Puerto Rico on December 25, 1980. The murder remains unsolved”. The marginalization of David Bourdon was so extreme that “he served as an editor at Life from 1966 to 1971, associate editor at Saturday Review from 1972 to 1974, senior editor at Geo from 1981 to 1983, and senior features editor at Vogue from 1983 to 1986. He was also The Village Voice’s art critic from 1964 to 1966 and 1974 to 1977.”

Migrants are celebrated with a larger-than-life statue: “Border Crossing is a tribute the artist’s grandfather and to the determination of the thousands of immigrants who have traveled across the southwestern border in search of a better life.” From the artist: “People talked about aliens as if they landed from outer space, as if they weren’t really people. I wanted to put a face on them: I wanted to humanize them” (isn’t it the very humanity of immigrants that makes them destructive to the American working class? Because they’re human they compete for housing, jobs, and welfare dollars)

University of Texas, Austin acknowledges that it is on stolen land, but refuses to give the land back and pay rent to the rightful indigenous owners who were “violently displaced”:

The “Oil Field Girls” who are “most likely working as prostitutes” (1940) seem to have dressed much more modestly than today’s Instagram creators!

For those who want to celebrate Maryland’s leading citizen, pupusas are available on campus:

(Kilmar Abrego Garcia claimed asylum on the basis that his mother’s pupusa recipe had resulted in gangs targeting him for death.)

Circling back to the first question… how does a private school of higher ed compete with University of Texas? The Gutenberg Bible alone might be worth $150 million.