This is the recent interview with Nick Gillespie. Thanks for listening.

Pano Canolas is the president of the University of Austin, which will be admitting its first class of 100 students this fall.

The college was founded in 2021 as an antidote to left-wing monoculture in academia, and it's committed to free speech

and the pursuit of truth above all else. I spoke with Canolas, a Shakespeare scholar and

first-generation college kid who grew up in a Greek diner in Chicago, about how the University

of Austin will be different from virtually every other college around,

why the humanities have virtually disappeared from higher education,

and how a chance encounter with Nobel laureate Saul Bellow changed his life.

He also does a quick, improvised, close reading of the poem,

Ovid in the Third Reich, by Jeffrey

Hill, one of his major intellectual influences.

Here is the Reason interview with Pano Canolis.

Panocanellis, thanks for talking to Reason.

Thank you for talking with me.

It's a great pleasure to have this conversation.

Okay.

Well, I'm going to be talking at you.

Talk at all. That's right. So, you know, just take it. I'll take it. But in a 2021 piece for the free press,

you, when you announced the creation of University at Austin, you talked about how, you about how America is filled with broken institutions and that higher education might be the most fractured institution of all. How

does the, how do you hope the University of Austin kind of knits those bones back together?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I think what I meant when I said that of all institutions,

...