CMR is the leading provider of funding and management support for small to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs 

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

There is a social contract of sorts among all governments of the world to share economic data on prevailing conditions. Behind that practice is a collegial contest to see which nation has the healthiest system, which in turn serves the capital markets by helping to direct resources where they are needed.

Sometimes the data is inaccurate. Sometimes there are lies. But in general, there is at least an attempt to play along with the expectation. This allows agencies and investors to make better assessments and prognostications, plus assist policy makers and central bankers in particular to make better judgments.

There is a general rule in operation. The more transparent governments are with the data they collect, and the more freedom of speech that is permitted to interpret the data in different ways, the more credible it is. It is also likely that governments which share and discuss also have numbers of which they can feel pride.

Rarely do nations go entirely silent on the market, as in turning off the switches and making the data rooms go dark. It is an ominous sign.

This is precisely what has happened in China.

Starting the last several months, and, in some cases, dating back several years, China has gone dark in reporting the following: land sales, foreign investment, unemployment numbers, business confidence, numbers of investors in financial markets, real estate valuation, retail sales, and even vital data on cremations so that health authorities have no idea what is going on. The bureaus have simply stopped reporting.

With the second largest economy, and widespread doubt about the country’s economic health, this is gravely concerning.

Close watchers have long raised doubts about China’s GDP data. We are told that the economy grew 5 percent last year, which would be extremely impressive. But such huge measures are subject to manipulation in every country but especially in one that has made the promise of extreme economic growth central to the power and permanent control by the CCP. Experts have suggested that growth rates have been exaggerated by 2 to 3 percentage points.

This past December, a highly regarded Chinese economist, Gao Shanwen, was visiting Washington, D.C. colleagues at the Peterson Institute and sat on an expert panel. Thinking that perhaps he should speak his mind, he said very plainly that no one knows for sure what the growth rates in China are. He speculated that they might be about 2 percent.

“My own speculation is that in the past two to three years,” he said, “the real GDP number on average might be around 2 percent even though the official number is close to 5 percent.”

No one in the room thought anything about it. The speaker seems to have temporarily forgotten that he is not an independent actor and was in no position to offer his objective assessment.

But word got out immediately in Beijing. He was immediately disciplined and silenced. He no longer holds a job in his old securities firm. His comments have been scrubbed from any sites accessible within China. He has lost his license to speak about economic affairs. Meanwhile, the Securities Association of China has instructed all people who speak about China’s economic health only to say nice things.

We can gather from the above that the data that was once routinely reported is not saying nice things. It’s one thing to silence the economists but to silence the underlying data only ends in raising alarm bells.

And those alarms have been rung, and now observers are considering the worst. There might be a hidden real estate crisis, and a major problem with unemployment added to it. Investment might be collapsing and government finances might be in major trouble.

For decades, China has developed a stable system for economic growth that relied on five main pillars:

1. Lower-cost manufacturing to compete and ultimately displace manufacturing in the West;

2. U.S. consumers hungry to get ahead of their own falling wages and salaries with cheaper consumer products and intermediate goods;

3. Central bank credits for business development built on large holdings of U.S. denominated debt;

4. A domestic currency trading far below the trade-weighted average of the U.S. dollar, the world reserve currency, thus favoring exports over imports;

5. State-directed and funded infrastructure development that calibrated investment based on national goals.

It was never the free market that pundits imagined that it would become in the 1990s and beyond. But it was also helped by a loose regulatory environment that minimized the litigation overhang that vexes Western economies, and its agency impositions were tolerant of enterprise insofar as it never threatened political priorities.

Crucially, China was able to benefit from the presumption that the global system of trade would never raise foundational questions about low tariffs and cross-border investment.

That last presumption has dramatically changed. The first Trump administration began the process of reevaluation. This was in 2018 and the result was a documented decline in U.S. imports from China. This was reversed two years later with the pandemic onset that called upon China to provide vast goods back into the United States. Mass numbers of Americans found themselves mandated to wear masks, for example, most of which were imports from China.

Five years later, the push to decouple the United States from dependence on China’s manufacturing sector is back on. The second Trump administration has wholesale reversed 80 years of U.S. precedent in trade policy with a turn toward tariffs. The hope is that these will help settle accounts, boost U.S. manufacturing, and provide a revenue stream to reduce reliance on high income taxation.

Whether and to what extent this dramatic shift has this effect domestically in the United States, it has likely had a major impact on China’s economic prospects, simply because it challenges a long-running assumption that the U.S. would forever serve as China’s consumer marketplace.

We should pause to consider the great irony of this whole situation. For centuries, businessmen have fantasized about the sheer size of China as a consumer, and imagined ways to invent products and services to sell.

“A pair of shoes for every Chinese foot;” “China’s market will make us rich;” “A market of 400 million customers”—these slogans were bandied about for a century.

But when it came right down to it, and herein we find the essence of the unpredictability of economic affairs, it was not China as consumer but China as manufacturer that dominated the landscape for decades following its opening.

Only now do we see full consciousness dawn in the United States concerning the implications for U.S. manufacturing.

What is to be done? A better path than protectionism is mass deregulation, a dollar more powerful at home and more competitive abroad, and lower costs of doing business through a renewal of the American entrepreneurial spirit. This will need to come one way or another. Trade barriers alone cannot hold back the tide.

Meanwhile, China suddenly faces its own grave economic challenges, which could grow so substantially as to threaten even the political stability of the country. Right now, outside observers have been largely blinded as to how serious the situation has become. We just don’t have the data.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

By Vincent Lanci

Summary: This report explores gold’s reemergence not merely as a store of value, but as a strategic monetary tool for circumventing sanctions, supporting trade diplomacy, and conducting debt management. Drawing upon historical precedent, contemporary developments, and theoretical frameworks such as Stephen Miran’s Mar-a-Lago Accord, this essay proposes that the United States is positioned to reengage in a sovereign-level gold trading for purposes of reducing debt, rewarding trade partners, and restoring the US manufacture-export base. This mechanism, once dominated by bullion banks and now emulated by sanctioned states, enables the monetization of gold without outright liquidation. Gold-forward hedges provide the United States with an opportunity to strategically weaken the dollar as a component of its need to remain competitive in export driven global economies, reduce debt obligations, and support trade-partner allies through targeted currency support. This report argues that gold’s transformation under Basel III, coupled with a shift in U.S. monetary strategy, marks a return to gold’s core geopolitical function.

I. Introduction. Gold is a store of value; it is money. With its immutable physical properties, universal recognition, and lack of counterparty risk, gold serves as a uniquely effective asset in sovereign monetary operations. This paper explores how the U.S. can operationalize gold as a monetary instrument to manage debt, influence foreign exchange dynamics, and pursue geopolitical leverage in a deglobalizing world.

II. Historical Foundation: The Bullion Bank Carry Trade. Beginning in the 1990s, bullion banks employed a gold carry trade model that enabled monetization without sale. This involved:

• Holding physical gold owned or on loan from another party (spot position)
• Selling that gold forward (creating a future potential liability)
• Investing the proceeds in higher-yielding assets (e.g., Treasuries, stocks, or foreign bonds)

This trade structure provided income while keeping physical reserves intact and suppressed upward pressure on gold prices. It became a cornerstone of central bank expectation management strategy and a projection tool of a stable, reliable USD.

III. The Mar-a-Lago Accord. Stephen Miran’s Mar-a-Lago Accord offered a blueprint for leveraging gold to manage U.S. debt and trade imbalances. That proposal involved:

• Selling U.S. gold reserves
• Using proceeds to purchase foreign currencies with higher yields
• Reducing the effective interest burden on U.S. liabilities

Though politically toxic, the ESF and similar tools had already historically been used in currency stabilization crises. While Miran’s Accord was publicly shelved, some of its core mechanisms remain feasible.

IV. Gold and Sanctions Evasion. The Russia-Iran Model Sanctioned states such as Russia and Iran have leveraged gold to access dollar liquidity via trusted counterparties. By holding and hedging gold through countries like China, they generate liquid proceeds in local or global currencies that are ultimately converted to dollars. This allows them to fund operations while avoiding SWIFT and U.S. financial enforcement.

The oil-for-gold arrangement between Russia and China first described by this paper’s author in 2017. set a precedent. Initially dismissed as rumor, it gained traction when later acknowledged by credible banking analysts. Most recently, an offshoot of its success was announced between China and Saudi Arabia in which the Saudis would receive payment for their oil in RMB with gold optionality attached. The gold would be held by China as it had been for Russian deals. This shows that gold can function as a sanctions-neutral reserve and transfer mechanism while simultaneously being a monetary bridge (mBridge) to the USD or other currencies if needed.

V. Structural Shifts in the Gold Market: The macro and regulatory backdrop has shifted:

• Basel III reclassifies gold as a Tier 1 asset
• Recent OCC Gold derivative reclassification at Banks
• These banks held over 90% of U.S. gold derivative exposure
• BRICS countries now prioritize gold over Treasuries for trade reserves

Together, these changes signal a revaluation of gold within both private and sovereign balance sheets.

VI. A New U.S. Strategy: Gold-Backed Trade Diplomacy. The U.S. can now pursue a sovereign gold carry trade:

• Forward-sale gold to trusted banks
• Use proceeds to buy foreign currencies or EM debt
• Prop up allied currencies, reduce dollar strength
• Execute monetary stimulus while avoiding inflation mismanagement

This framework allows integration of trade and monetary policy. As part of bilateral trade negotiations, the U.S. can offer to stabilize emerging-market currencies, reducing resistance to tariff reform and strengthening political ties.

VII. Conclusion. Gold is returning to center stage as a versatile tool for 21st-century financial statecraft. By adopting carry trade mechanisms pioneered by bullion banks and mirrored by adversarial regimes, the U.S. has the opportunity to align debt management, currency strategy, and trade diplomacy. The convergence of regulatory changes, gold repatriation, and geopolitical fragmentation makes this moment uniquely ripe for gold’s strategic reintegration.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will be conducting more unannounced inspections at facilities outside the country, the agency announced on May 6.

The FDA conducts about 3,000 inspections of foreign facilities each year, but many facility operators are informed of the inspections weeks or even months ahead of time.

“For too long, foreign companies have enjoyed a double standard—given advanced notice before facility inspections, while American manufacturers are held to rigorous standards with no such warning,” Dr. Marty Makary, the FDA’s commissioner, said in a statement. “That ends today.”

The FDA said it intends to expand unannounced inspections at facilities that manufacture a range of goods, including food and medicine. According to the FDA, the expansion will “help expose bad actors—those who falsify records or conceal violations—before they can put American lives at risk. ”

The move builds on an FDA pilot program that tested more unannounced inspections in China and India.

Some U.S. lawmakers, including Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Jim Justice (R-W.Va.), had recently asked the FDA to conduct more unannounced inspections.

Investigators with the FDA previously told the Government Accountability Office that the downsides of letting facilities know before inspections are conducted include giving them time to clean up and implement new operating procedures. Twelve of the 18 inspectors who spoke to the office said that unannounced inspections are generally better.

The office recommended that the FDA increase the number of inspections of foreign facilities in 2008 and found that the FDA was conducting many more domestic inspections than foreign inspections in 2010. In 2016, the office said the FDA had increased the number of foreign inspections, but that many facilities manufacturing drugs that enter the United States were never inspected.

The FDA suspended virtually all foreign inspections after the COVID-19 pandemic started, although it later resumed the work.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, a former FDA official, told lawmakers in 2019, before the pandemic started, that the FDA typically gives notice for foreign inspections because of logistics such as securing visas, “and partly because of the high costs of conducting foreign inspections.”

“When a surveillance inspection is announced, some manufacturers conduct a self-inspection or hire an independent inspector to ensure that manufacturing processes meet requirements,” she said.

An audit of FDA inspections of foreign facilities producing drugs, reported in 2022 by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, identified problems with the inspections, including a lack of training documentation for some of the inspectors and a failure to issue warning letters to companies on a timely basis.

The FDA concurred with the watchdog’s recommendations for improvement, including making sure inspectors have adequate training before conducting inspections.

 

Authored by Rudy Blalock via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Columbia University announced on Tuesday that it will lay off nearly 180 staff members after the Trump administration revoked more than $400 million in federal research funding, Columbia’s Office of the President said in a May 6 statement.

The layoffs, which represent about 20 percent of university employees who were funded by the now-terminated federal grants, come as Columbia grapples with the fallout from the U.S. Department of Education’s decision to cancel hundreds of millions in grants and contracts.

The department cited the university’s alleged failure to adequately address persistent anti-Semitism on campus as the reason for the funding withdrawal.

In a message to the Columbia community, acting President Claire Shipman, Provost Angela V. Olinto, Executive Vice President for Finance Anne Sullivan, and Executive Vice President for Research Jeannette Wing described the decision as “deeply challenging” and said it was made after a thorough review of the university’s research activity and financial outlook.

“Across the research portfolio, we have had to make difficult choices and unfortunately, today, nearly 180 of our colleagues who have been working, in whole or in part, on impacted federal grants, will receive notices of non-renewal or termination,” the statement read.

The university said it has been engaged in a two-pronged effort in response to the funding crisis. First, it is working to restore partnerships with federal agencies that support critical research. Second, it has asked deans and principal investigators to prioritize research activities and develop plans for managing projects affected by the loss of federal support.

During the review period, Columbia continued to pay salaries and stipends for those whose compensation had been covered by the terminated grants, according to the press release.

Columbia’s leadership said they are continuing discussions with federal officials in hopes of resuming activity on the canceled research awards and other projects that remain active but unpaid.

They said the financial strain is “intense,” and the university has been forced to reduce expenditures and scale back research infrastructure in some areas. Some departments are winding down activity but are prepared to reestablish capabilities if funding is restored, according to the university.

The funding revocation follows President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14188, signed on Jan. 29, which directs federal agencies to use all available legal tools to prosecute and hold accountable those accused of anti-Semitic harassment and violence on college campuses.

The Department of Education launched investigations into several universities, including Columbia, where “widespread antisemitic harassment has been reported.”

“Universities must comply with all federal anti-discrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding. For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement.

The Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which includes the departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, Education, and the General Services Administration, has been reviewing Columbia’s compliance with federal regulations, particularly under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in federally funded programs.

In response to the crisis, Columbia has established a Research Stabilization Fund to help mitigate future funding risks and support its scientific community. The fund will provide internal grants to scientists seeking alternate sources of funding or completing research for publication. The university will also contribute funds to support graduate students and postdoctoral fellows affected by the loss of federal training grants, according to the press release.

“We are grateful for the exceptional leadership and professionalism of our deans, chairs, and senior management who have come together to navigate this critical moment with care and integrity, while upholding and advancing Columbia’s mission, values, and the unique qualities that make this a vital, extraordinary place,” the statement said.

The university warned that further actions may be necessary in the coming months to preserve financial flexibility and invest in key areas.

From NTD News

Authored by John Murawski via RealClearInvestigations,

AUSTIN, Texas — Lacking three crucial components – students, faculty, and facilities – the two educational experiments proposed in this state capital sounded like moonshots just a few years ago. 

Today, the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas and a feisty startup calling itself the University of Austin are not just up and running, but helping lead the movement to revive classical liberal education across the country.

Now in their second semesters, the two unrelated schools – one public, one private – offer a mix of courses emphasizing political theory, economics, philosophy, and canonical texts that appeal to big-time donors eager to fund traditional academic subjects that have fallen into neglect, or even disdain, in the ivory tower. A big part of their strategy relies on a naked grab for the academic market share by being perceived as more relevant, more exciting, and more consequential. 

“We’re a throwback to an older model that sees serious engagement with the great debates of the Western tradition as the best possible preparation for leadership,” said Antonio Sosa, a professor at UT-Austin’s School of Civic Leadership. “We’re not interested in deconstructing America’s founding and the West; we’re not focused on race and gender.”

The reform efforts underway in Austin are now approaching a major milestone: the end of their first academic year, with further expansion around the corner. Commonly known by their acronyms, SCL will be launching a Civics Honors major with about 100 students this coming fall, while UATX will be adding a second freshman cohort of about 100 students as the current batch advances to its second year. 

Both are part of a national academic civics movement to create viable alternatives to higher ed trends that their backers deem intellectually bankrupt and moral dead ends: the penchant for DEI and social justice activism, training students in narrow careerism or “jobism,” and incentivizing the faculty fetish for fads and hyper-specialization.

Over the past quarter-century, more than 100 academic civics initiatives have arisen, emphasizing such themes as the Great Books, the Western canon, free markets, and individual liberty. In the latest incarnation of this trend, the University of Austin is comparable, at least superficially, to niche, independent colleges like Hillsdale, Ralston, St. John’s (Maryland), and Deep Springs that emphasize intellectual foundations and distinctive academic cultures. UATX’s board of advisers is a who’s who of public intellectuals, most of whom require no introductions in academic circles: Richard Dawkins, Jonathan Haidt, Robert George, Glenn Loury, Harvey Mansfield, Deirdre McCloskey, Nadine Strossen, Larry Summers, Andrew Young, among others.  

UT-Austin’s program is part of a new wave backed by conservative donors, trustees, and lawmakers that includes 13 autonomous civics schools established at eight public universities – including five in Ohio  – that have their own deans, their own majors, and, in some cases, their own Ph.D. programs. The School of Civic Leadership includes its own think tank, The Civitas Institute, which is modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution; its roster of fellows includes John Yoo, a lawyer who served in the George W. Bush administration; Jenna Silver Storey, an American Enterprise Institute fellow who specializes in the civics movement; Arthur C. Brooks, former AEI president and Harvard scholar of leadership and happiness; and Vincent Phillip Muñoz, a University of Notre Dame legal scholar and well-known constitutional originalist. 

UATX President Pano Kanelos, who compares the creation of the University of Austin to Plato’s founding of the Academy in Athens in 387 BC, predicts that “we’re growing a university that’ll be around for centuries.” But observers note that these and other civic education reform efforts are some years away from achieving the movement’s ultimate goal: producing a permanent infrastructure with a pipeline of scholars to lead and populate similar programs across the country. In the coming years, they must deliver on their long-term promises to their backers that they can attract competitive students, produce consequential scholarship, place graduates in solid careers, and grow their programs into lasting institutions.

It’s no coincidence that both are located in Austin, a vibrant college town and state capital known for its music festivals, its Silicon Hills tech hub, and its countercultural motto: Keep Austin Weird. The Austin-American Statesman newspaper describes the city's famed South By Southwest Festival (a.k.a. SXSW) as "a giant, caffeine-and-booze-fueled playground for creatives."

With conservative intellectuals creating their own anti-establishment ethos, Austin has also become home to the global headquarters of Elon Musk’s EV venture, Tesla, and the home of the dissident political podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. In a nod to these counter-cultural landmarks, an earlier iteration of UATX’s FAQs page used to proclaim: “If it’s good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, it’s good enough for us.”

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Nevertheless, both schools are still in their infancy. The University of Austin, for example, is now housed in a repurposed department store in downtown Austin that looks like a hip, Gen Z shared workspace. To attract top students, it’s covering all tuition costs for the teenagers who are taking the risk of attending a startup that lacks accreditation, a complicated review process that could take longer than expected. Likewise, at the University of Texas, School of Civic Leadership Dean Justin Dyer said that a common question that arises in faculty searches is “whether our funding is secure and whether this is a viable long-term project.”

Even as they grapple with challenges common to start-ups, the two programs continue to face skepticism from the entrenched academic interests they are seeking to reform. The common refrain is that they function as conservative safe spaces and cheerleaders for Western Civilization, out of touch with contemporary scholarship. And yet, for the most part, the educational reforms underway in Austin have avoided major public controversy, and their early success is evident in their confidence that they represent the future of higher education.

“We are a self-conscious rebel faction that’s offering a new university on the model of the old,” said Morgan Marietta, UATX’s dean of economics, politics, and history. “Our movement is: We’re going to take their students, we’re going to take their faculty, we’re going to take their money – that’s how we’re going to win.” 

A recent visit to Austin offered a glimpse of how these two programs are alike, how they differ, and what they look like in practice. The University of Austin leadership is brash and provocative, and tends to hire public intellectuals active on the podcast circuit and in other journalistic outlets. Within weeks of launching in 2021, two high-profile advisers – Harvard professor Steven Pinker and then-University of Chicago chancellor Robert Zimmer – resigned from the advisory board, with Zimmer stating that he could not abide by the startup university’s exaggerated statements about the incorrigibility of academia. UATX does not offer tenure to its faculty, but instead hires on five-year renewable contracts. 

As a public entity, UT’s School of Civic Leadership is more traditional, hiring tenure-track faculty and evoking the marble-and-mahogany solemnity of a present indebted to the past. Many of SCL’s classes are offered in the school’s current headquarters, the Victorian-era Littlefield House, appointed with wood-paneled walls, antique furniture, and regal paintings of Texas grandees.

The students in the maiden class are essentially ambassadors for these programs, and tend to speak in that mode.  

“I think every student should take at least one civics class because the ideas are so expansive, so inspiring, and thought-provoking,” said Debbie Chu, a sophomore and a government major currently taking Professor Sosa’s “Perennial Problems in Civic Thought” class. 

Both of these programs are in their infancy, and they are still undecided on where their permanent facilities will be located. UATX might at some point create an open campus away from the downtown office it now occupies, and has enlisted famed architect Léon Krier to draw up a master plan, Kanelos said. It has raised over $200 million from more than 3,000 donors, including real estate developer Harlan Crow, notable friend of Justice Clarence Thomas; hedge fund titan Bill Ackman; and billionaire trader Jeff Yass, who has given $35 million, the single biggest gift to date to UATX. The donations and pledges so far can fund UATX’s operations until at least 2030, Kanelos said, by which time the new college expects to have accreditation, which will be retroactive to all graduates, and will be charging tuition. 

UT’s School of Civic Leadership was initially funded with $6 million from the Texas state legislature and Board of Regents, and the Regents are tentatively looking at adding $5 million more for a total of $11 million, said Dyer, SCL’s dean. The school now has 14 tenure-line faculty members, approaching its Board of Regents mandate of hiring 20 faculty within three years. SCL has also netted $20 million in donations and pledges from the likes of Crow and Robert Rowling, a hotel magnate ranked 126 on Forbes’ 400 richest Americans. 

Getting to this point could be considered a minor miracle, but such accelerated development hasn’t come without growth pains. 

A finance professor at UT-Austin who had planned to start a conservative “Liberty Institute” has accused the university administration of hijacking the idea, diluting it, and threatening him with retaliation for public criticism. The professor, Richard Lowery, has aired his allegations in conservative outlets, The National Review and the James Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Lowery’s lawsuit against UT was dismissed by a federal judge and is now pending on appeal. 

Last September, UT-Austin’s Faculty Council approved SCL’s Civics Honors major by a razor-thin vote of 23 to 21. According to the description of the course of the study, the curriculum will be tailored to “high-performing students” who “will study the wisdom of the past not in order to become antiquarians but in order to subject the conventional orthodoxies of the present to rational critique.” To anyone in academia, “conventional orthodoxies” has unambiguous overtones: wokeness, DEI, and social justice advocacy. 

According to a transcript of the meeting, a number of professors voiced their opposition. 

“I think it’s important for us to, as the Faculty Council, take note and perhaps a stand on the political origin of this discipline imposed upon the University by the legislature,” said astronomy professor Paul Shapiro. “When does the legislature get to tell us we need to teach something we’re not teaching? And I think that is the question we should be asking. How is this free of that political origin?”

Mathematics professor Lorenzo Sadun, who served on the committee that hired Dyer as SCL Dean, told the Faculty Council that the hiring committee members were initially very skeptical, but “the more we talked with our top candidates, one of whom became our Dean, the more we were really impressed” with the project. 

In an email to RealClearInvestigations, Sadun said the School of Civic Leadership is unquestionably a political project, but one that can be justified on the merits.

“The impetus for creating the school was overtly and unambiguously political, with a lot of pressure from outside the University,” Sadun explained. “I hated the idea, as did most of the faculty.” 

“However, the people charged with creating it saw an opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons,” Sadun continued. “To make a place where conservative thought can thrive, but in dialogue with liberal thought, not in isolation. That sort of dialogue is what universities are for, regardless of how much I may personally disagree with the SCL leaders' political ideas.”

Civics advocates describe their schools and curricula as nonpartisan and apolitical, but at the same time, anchored in the vision of America’s founding principles that were erected upon the foundation of Western Civilization. 

UATX President Kanelos was formerly the president of St. John’s College, a small liberal arts institution in Annapolis, Maryland, emphasizing a Great Books curriculum. He said that University of Austin students read more than 20,000 pages in their first two years, which constitute UATX’s Intellectual Foundations curriculum, where all the students take the same core classes in the same order.

A Mix of Old and New 

Dyer comes from a different background. In a 2017 article, he described himself as “a conservative, straight out of central casting, a pro-life evangelical who is an unapologetic admirer of the American Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution.” In his 2013 book, “Abortion, Slavery, and Constitutional Meaning,” published by Cambridge University Press, Dyer argues that abortion is legally analogous to slavery, in that certain classes of humanity are deprived of legal status and legal protections.

The course selections at both programs, more than two dozen in all, offer a mix of old and new. This semester, UATX is offering “Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency” and “Artificial Intelligence II” alongside “Crown, Cathedral, and Crusade” and “Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy.” 

About two miles away, UT-Austin’s School of Civic Leadership is offering multiple units of “Intro to Philosophy, Politics, and Economics” and “Constitutional Principles: Core Texts” alongside “Democracy and Capitalism” and “The Age of Reformation.”

An RCI reporter’s visit to three SCL classes revealed courses taught by a combination of lecture and discussion, with a heavy reading load. SCL’s syllabi for the classes being taught this semester show that the readings hew to the classical liberal model of exposing students to primary sources and historical debates about slavery, due process, libel, abortion, and other controversies.

Introduction to Philosophy, Politics, and Economics readings include Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Adam Smith, Thomas Sowell, John Rawls, Friedrich Hayek, John Jacques Rousseau, Kurt Vonnegut, among a host of others. The Democracy and Capitalism class likewise includes reading selections and podcast episodes representing a variety of perspectives – Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom,” Robert Heilbroner’s “Socialism,” Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” Irving Kristol’s “On Corporate Capitalism in America,” George Stigler’s “Monopoly,” those being just a sample.

Dyer is teaching a course called Constitutional Rights that is heavy on U.S. Supreme Court rulings and dissents. Dyer’s syllabus contains a two-word clue – “close reading” – to the way historical texts are interpreted in the civics culture, a phrase that also appears on other SCL syllabi. The phrase means much more than simply careful reading or attention to detail. The words contain an entire philosophy governing the relationship between a reader and a text, which is based on the belief that texts contain objective meanings, and that the student’s job is to attempt to comprehend that meaning. Once a mainstay of academia, that approach has fallen out of favor and is a radical departure from contemporary methods that dismiss traditional interpretations of classical texts as naïve or sycophantic, and say that today’s readers are heir to an evolved understanding of history that gives them the moral authority to stand in judgment of the past. 

As Professor Sosa explained in an interview after his class, “We don’t study with the assumption that the students and faculty are better or smarter than the things they’re studying.”

Zach Lacy, a UT-Austin sophomore triple-majoring in government, philosophy, and classical languages, said he was not exposed to a single “great book” in high school, and the School of Civic Leadership is unlike any other education he has experienced. 

“I really get to chew on the texts, read deeply and fully understand it,” he said. “There’s a sincerity in approaching the text and acknowledging there is wisdom that we do not have.”

John Murawski reports on the intersection of culture and ideas for RealClearInvestigations. He previously covered artificial intelligence for the Wall Street Journal and spent 15 years as a reporter for the News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) writing about health care, energy and business. At RealClear, Murawski reports on how esoteric academic theories on race and gender have been shaping many areas of public life, from K-12 school curricula to workplace policies to the practice of medicine.