Surely THIS Bari Weiss/Niall Ferguson Venture Will Work!
Will they do to CBS News what they did to the University of Austin?
In a recent CBS News town hall, newish editor-in-chief Bari Weiss told staffers that despite the noise surrounding her first few months on the job, she was determined to restore trust in mainstream media. According to Brian Stelter, she said in her remarks that she wanted to “widen the aperture of the stories we tell and the voices we hear from and the people we listen to.” Weiss then introduced some new contributors to the network news division. According to Axios’ Sara Fischer, “Some of those personalities are existing columnists and contributors for The Free Press, including conservative historian Niall Ferguson…. The new lineup will test the newsroom's comfort with contributors who bring a sharper and more opinionated voice than the network has traditionally embraced.”
Speaking of sharper and more opinionated voices, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has made its low opinion of Niall Ferguson’s recent corpus of work abundantly clear. He wrote the single-dumbest op-ed of the 2024 presidential campaign, one that has aged horribly in the fifteen months since it was published. His other musings about Trump have not exactly been bangers either.
Weiss bringing Ferguson onto CBS does remind me, however, of a prior Weiss/Ferguson joint venture that has not exactly turned out as planned. That would be the University of Austin (UATX), a supposedly heterodox university that was intended to disrupt higher education. According to its website, “UATX will renew the mission of the university, and serve as a model for institutions of higher education, by safeguarding academic freedom and promoting intellectual pluralism.” Weiss and Ferguson were among the university’s founders.
When UATX was originally announced four and a half years ago, I expressed a few doubts about whether it would really be able to fulfill its stated purpose. As you can imagine, I was therefore shocked — shocked! — to read a recent Politico essay by Evan Mandery that went behind the scenes at the University of Austin to see how well it is doing in promoting the values of open inquiry and civil discourse. The answer appears to be: not well.
[On April 2, 2025] all of the professors and staff were summoned, quite unusually and mysteriously, to a closed-door meeting. It had been called by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire entrepreneur who’d co-founded the data analytics company Palantir Technologies with Thiel. Together with Ferguson and the journalist Bari Weiss, Lonsdale had been a driving force behind the creation of UATX and was a member of the board of trustees. But he wasn’t often present on campus, and it was almost unheard of for a member of the board to summon the staff, as Lonsdale had….
“Let’s get right into it,” he said. Then, with heightened affect, Lonsdale explained his vision for UATX — a jingoistic vision with shades of America First rhetoric that contrasted rather sharply with the image UATX had cultivated as a bastion of free speech and open inquiry.
“It was like a speech version of the ‘America love it or leave it’ bumper sticker,” one former staffer told me, and if you didn’t share the vision, the message was “there’s the door, you don’t belong here.” Like many of the people I spoke with for this story, the staffer was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. “It was the most uncomfortable 35-to-40ish minutes I’ve ever experienced. People were shifting uncomfortably in their seats.”
The chancellor, Pano Kanelos, who’d recently been nominally promoted from the presidency, sat silently, noticeably ill at ease.
The harshness of Lonsdale’s diatribe would have been out of place on any college campus, but was particularly so at UATX, which had framed itself as a bulwark against the cancel culture that many contend has become common in the American academy. UATX’s image had never been entirely nonpartisan, but Lonsdale’s message signaled a decisive, rightward turn.
Lonsdale’s strident speech was enough for Michael Lind to decide to resign — a decision that he temporarily rescinded after Niall Ferguson reached out and, according to Lind: “Niall emphasized that UATX is a real institution, not the plaything of donors and regents, and has a constitution that binds even the chairman of the board.” As it turns out, however, that constitution subsequently got rewritten — and Lind eventually departed.
As the UATX saga continued, the school appears to have produced a mostly pedestrian curriculum lacking both the intellectual diversity and the freedom of inquiry that inspire its founding. One UATX student told Mandery, “I didn’t realize exactly how conservative it would be. You know, when I hear free speech and open debate and all that jazz, I assumed that there was going to be a more equal amount of political views, and there wasn’t.”
The story gets worse after Trump is inaugurated. Ferguson, labeling UATX as the “anti-Harvard,” rejected criticism of the administration’s attacks on Harvard, and continued to drift ever-rightward. As for Weiss, well….
Where was Bari Weiss? Many of the people I interviewed told me about internal conversations and shared internal emails. Weiss, who remains on the board of trustees, was almost never present in the conversations as they were related to me, and while I saw many emails on which Kanelos and Ferguson were copied, I never saw any including Weiss.
One person I spoke to, who was present during the early planning stages, told me that Weiss was “very elusive” and almost never present in person. This was ironic since UATX was closely associated with Weiss — a bust of whom now resides in the school library.
Mandery — who believed that UATX was founded with the best of intentions — sadly concludes, “The ultimate irony is that UATX fell prey to the very impulses that its founders and supporters so detested.”
This is a familiar theme when it comes to Weiss and Ferguson. As previously noted, Weiss’ claims of balanced coverage do not hold up to serious scrutiny;1 she has trended right over time. At UATX, Weiss and Ferguson started something with lofty principles that, in the end, have fallen flat.
To believe they will succeed at CBS where they failed at the University of Austin requires a belief that this time around, Weiss and Ferguson have moved down the learning curve and are wiser for it. Readers can judge for themselves the likelihood of that supposition being true.
Kinda like most Niall Ferguson op-eds.
Niall Ferguson appears to have no shame at all. I suspect he only hangs out with people who think like him. I can't imagine he'd be comfortable with opinion held of him by an academic who really does value critical thinking rather than fidelity to a political point of view. Saying that Trump triumphed at Davos is .... the sort of thing that should never be lived down.
In his own substack newsletter, Ferguson cannot stop wetting his pants every time he talks about Trump’s appearance in Davos.