In a former Texas department store, the University of Austin, known as UATX, started classes this fall with a say-anything, shout-nothing philosophy. UATX’s motto is “the pursuit of truth.”

The school swaps DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — for what some call MEI: merit, excellence and intelligence. UATX, co-founded by historian Niall Ferguson, launched with a focus on encouraging free speech and open debate. 

“University forms the way you think about the world for the rest of your life,” Ferguson said. “If our universities are screwed up, and I believe they are, then that will screw up America as a whole quite quickly.”

Flaws UATX founders see at colleges around the U.S.

American universities have long been left-leaning and sites of protest, but the atmosphere has intensified in recent years. College students have shouted down unpopular speakers and canceled professors. The campus chaos of this past year, since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, even led to congressional hearings about on-campus protests and, ultimately, the resignation of several university presidents.

The contempt for today’s campus culture — the safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions — helped swing this month’s election. President-elect Donald Trump has said he plans to tax and sue “excessively large private universities” for promoting “wokeness” and dismantle the Department of Education, which distributes billions of dollars to universities each year.

Harvard self reports that less than 3% of its faculty identifies as conservative, while more than 75% identify as liberal — a proportion that’s deeply inconsistent with the views and makeup of the American public. 

“There’s a huge disconnect now between the academic elite and the average American voter,” Ferguson said. 

This political imbalance, combined with social media and an army of campus administrators monitoring speech have led to a culture where, per one survey, nearly 80% of students self-censor on campus for fear of being ostracized, Ferguson said. 

Faculty feels the chill on free speech, too. Ferguson spoke of a university president who said he received, on average, one email a day from a member of the university community calling for somebody else to be fired for something they’d said.

“That reminds me vividly of the bad old days of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and yet it’s happening on American campuses,” Ferguson said.

Ferguson says, the problems at colleges have a ripple effect. 

“I think if a university system starts to go wrong, then something is bound to go wrong for the society as a whole,” Ferguson said. “The ideas that start on campus pretty quickly spread to corporations, to media organizations.”

Colleges, to the detriment of learning, have become echo chambers, according to UATX President Pano Kanelos. 

“One opinion meeting another opinion shouldn’t leave us with two opinions,” Kanelos said. “It should leave us with better opinions.”

How UATX got its start

UATX was conceived largely by frustrated professors looking to fix the problems they see on college campuses. Ferguson, an Oxford-educated historian and former Harvard professor, launched UATX in 2021 with former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss; Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of data analytics company Palantir; and Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. John’s College in Maryland. Among others, Larry Summers, the former Harvard president and U.S. treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, became an adviser. 

“From a historian’s point of view, it’s terribly important that the United States improves, reforms, revitalizes its universities,” Ferguson said. 

In an ad, the school said it was “done waiting for America’s universities to fix themselves.”

“Right up until I guess the early 2000s, it still seemed like universities were the places where you could think most freely, and speak most freely, and take the most intellectual risk,” Ferguson said. “And at some point in the last 10 years, that changed. And it changed in a way that began to stifle free expression.”

High-profile donors include Trump-backing billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard graduate who vocally criticized his school after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas against Israel that sparked the deadly war in the Middle East, and Harlan Crow, a close friend of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

Nadine Strossen, a liberal legal scholar who headed up the ACLU for nearly 20 years, is also a UATX adviser. Strossen believes the most important public policy topics — abortion, immigration, police practices, race and gender — are not being discussed candidly on college campuses. Provided there is no serious harm, Strossen argues all speech should be allowed. 

“My concern is to try to eliminate the underlying discriminatory attitudes. You don’t do that by punishing expression,” Strossen said. “You do that through education, through more speech, not less.”

UATX’s free speech philosophy resonated with college professors across the country. When UATX announced its founding, thousands of academics sent in job inquiries. Some of UATX’s hires were disciplined at their previous schools; Kanelos said UATX is not a haven for canceled professors. 

“But many of the people who are pushing the boundaries in academic culture, let’s say, in the public sphere, have paid a price for that and still should be heard,” he said.

Critics attack UATX as nothing more than a right-wing university wearing the cloak of free speech. 

“Politics should be studied at a university. It shouldn’t be the operating system of the university,” Kanelos said. “Any university that is identifiably political is not fulfilling its highest mission.”

UATX received initial approval from the state of Texas and raised nearly $200 million from private donors, used in part to provide free tuition. National accreditation won’t be decided until the first class has graduated — a standard for new universities. 

What’s in the curriculum at UATX

UATX uses the Chatham House Rule to combat student fear of saying the wrong things in class. The Chatham House Rule means that students who may hear interesting or controversial points can refer to the information they’ve heard, but they cannot attribute it to the person who said it. 

“People fear that the thing they said that was not right, was politically incorrect, ends up on X or, for that matter, on Instagram,” Ferguson said. “And that which happens in the classroom should stay in the classroom.”

Classes at UATX are small, seminar-style and based in Western civilization—the Bible and Greek classics. Faculty includes a former Navy captain, a Greek Orthodox priest and a tech entrepreneur.

There are no on-campus science labs, but founders chose Austin for its booming startup culture. UATX links students with companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink and helps the kids sharpen their technical skills and even fund their own ideas. 

To stem the high costs of higher education, the UATX campus is bare bones: no dorms and no meal plans.

Who are the UATX students?

Unlike the nearby University of Texas at Austin — one of the country’s largest schools — there are just 92 students in the first class at University of Austin. Roughly half the students come from Texas. A third are women. Students share academic strength, averaging in the 92nd percentile on the SAT. Some were accepted at schools like the University of Chicago and Georgetown, but they chose UATX instead. 

University President Kanelos said the school looks for applicants who think deeply and challenge norms. 

“The primary thing that we’re interested in is the mind,” Kanelos said. 

Students told 60 Minutes the inaugural class is politically diverse. 

“I’ve met people of every political persuasion here from, like, far-left Democrats who are for Bernie Sanders or to the left of that even, to people who would make Donald Trump look like a liberal,” student Jacob Hornstein said. 

Despite the different views, student Constantin Whitmire said classmates listen to each other and are still friends. He and Hornstein agreed that they vehemently disagree on a lot of topics. 

“We still get along pretty well, and it’s a beautiful thing,” Whitmire said. 

Differing views and outspokenness about those beliefs are welcomed. It’s why Dylan Wu chose UATX; he wants his beliefs to be challenged. 

“I want them to be challenged because I know that I’m wrong in some way,” Wu said.

After working on cars for gangs, battling crystal meth addiction and facing three criminal convictions, legendary lowrider painter Rob Vanderslice might not have expected to be hired by the Albuquerque Police Department to paint a car for them. 

But it happened, and Vanderslice’s personal journey of rehabilitation serves as a powerful sign of the path taken by New Mexico’s lowriders in recent years.

For years, lowriders and their drivers — also called lowriders — were seen as inextricably connected to drugs and gangs. It’s taken decades, but that perception is finally changing and the candy-colored cars are now steadily rolling into admiration and respectability. 

The transformation has been particularly pronounced in the lowrider hotbed of northern New Mexico.

What are lowriders?

Lowriders are customized cars with the chassis lowered so that they narrowly clear the ground.

The cars are also known for crazy gymnastics made possible by hydraulic pumps tied to their suspensions. Eppie Martinez has installed hydraulics in more than 500 lowriders, including his own 1952 Chevy Bel Air. 

“It’s aircraft technology,” Martinez said, pointing to the pumps originally designed to control aircraft flaps and landing gear, now controlled by switches at the driver’s seat to make cars tilt and bounce. 

Over the years, Martinez has installed hydraulics that transform cars into what lowriders call hoppers, bouncing sky-high. In Espanola, New Mexico, which calls itself the lowrider capital of the world, there are competitions among hoppers to see which car can jump the highest. 

Most lowrider cars are Cadillacs, Pontiacs and Chevys from the glory days of Detroit. They’re customized with elaborate interiors, intricate engravings and kaleidoscopic paint jobs. The cars are all labors of love — either do-it-yourself projects or professionally restored vehicles that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. 

But they all have one thing in common, whether they hop to the sky or sit low to the ground: lowriders are meant to draw attention.

“Lowriders are all about that, right? They’re the car amongst cars. They’re going to be the one that pops,” said Espanola native Patricia Trujillo. 

How lowriders became a part of American culture and gang culture

The roots of lowrider culture in New Mexico stretch back to just after World War II, according to Trujillo, a college professor and deputy cabinet secretary of New Mexico’s Department of Higher Education. She says many Mexican-Americans joined the Army, then came back home after the war and felt they were being treated as second-class citizens. 

“[They] basically created this counterculture to be able to speak back and say, ‘We belong here, too,'” Trujillo said. “It’s almost like a saunter or a swagger in vehicle form.”

Early lowriders embraced America’s car culture, but made it their own. 

In the late 1980s, gangster rap artists took perceptions of lowriders in a different direction. The cars made regular appearances in music videos, which contributed to a public impression tied to gangs and drugs. Many cities passed anti-cruising ordinances in the ’80s and ’90s. 

Vanderslice, a rare “gringo” in New Mexico’s lowrider scene, started painting lowriders in the 1980s. 

“Back then I did a car for just about every gang you could think, you know what I mean?,” he said.

He made the decision to turn his life around after this third conviction – he’s 13 years clean from an addiction to crystal meth – and he’s now painting lowriders for very different clients, including the Albuquerque Police Department. 

Lowrider image improves 

Lowriding was banned in Santa Fe for many years. But in 2016, the city’s mayor not only dropped the ban on cruising but also declared a Lowrider Day, during which lowriders slow-rolled through Santa Fe’s historic plaza  by the hundreds. 

“There was this real shift in culture in that moment of recognizing lowriders as an important part of our heritage, an important part of the artistry of our communities,” Patricia Trujillo said. “And I really feel like that marked a new moment in New Mexico.”

Joan and Arthur Medina personify the morphing of lowriders’ image in the Espanola Valley. Joan was in junior high school when she met Arthur more than 40 years ago.

Of course, she was drawn in by Arthur’s lowrider. “You could see it for miles,” she said.

That car is still in a makeshift museum full of lowriders outsider their home.

“Wherever we take our cars, people are drawn to his artwork, people are drawn to what we’ve done to the cars and who we are, and people know us from all over,” Joan said.

But if drawing attention was once the only goal, the Medinas are now using that attention to help kids and serve their community.

They volunteer in their community, and help organize other local lowriders for public service projects like clothing drives for the homeless and providing meals to area kids. 

Trujillo views the change as part of a redefinition of the rebellion at the heart of lowrider culture. 

“Rebellion now is healing,” she said. “To be that beacon of hope.”

Hope for the future 

Espanola needs hope. With rates of poverty, crime and drug addiction well above state and national averages, despair is part of the landscape. 

Many kids in the area are from broken homes, according to Ben Sandoval, director of Espanola’s YMCA Teen Center. 

“There’s drugs. There’s bad influences,” Sandoval said. “What we try to do through the Teen Center is to provide them a safe place.”

In 2023, Sandoval got a grant from the Drug Enforcement Administration for a project to build lowrider bicycles as a way to help at-risk kids. 

“First of all, it gives them an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got to get to the teen center after school every Wednesday,'” Sandoval said. “They have to feel that they’re valued in their role as the engineer, as the designer, as the planner.”

The finished bikes were so creative and impressive that the prestigious Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe mounted a special exhibition to put them on display.

“I’d sit back with three or four youth, and I say, ‘Look at that. They’re taking pictures of your bike,” Sandoval said. “That’s what you did.” 

This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker took a little trip to Española, New Mexico, the self-proclaimed lowrider capital of the world. 

Lowriders are exactly what they sound like: cars that ride low to the ground. But they also are also famous for their brightly colored, eye-catching paintwork.

While reporting the story, Whitaker met an artist named Rob Vanderslice, a rare “gringo” in the lowrider world, which originated in the Mexican American communities of the Southwest and West Coast just after World War II. 

Vanderslice made a name for himself with his elaborate, serpentine paint jobs that stretch across the vehicle, something that has become known as a “Rob job.” 

“Everything I do is with tape… you tape it, you spray it, you untape it,” Vanderslice explained to Whitaker in an interview. 

He said some designs take three or four months of careful planning, until the final layers and patterns are ready to be painted on. 

Despite their origins, lowriders first entered wider public consciousness during the heyday of gangster rap, when the cars were featured in the music videos of Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and Dr. Dre, beginning in the late 1980s.

“The cars played a big role in a lot of the videos. But that also associated the cars with gangs, and even with drug dealing,” Whitaker told 60 Minutes Overtime. 

Vanderslice said many of his customers were gang members and wanted their own lowriders, emulating rap’s biggest stars. 

“If you were somebody from the hood, and you see all these fancy cars… what does it take to get one of those cars?” he told Whitaker.

“You would do whatever you could do… to end up with one of those cars.” 

Vanderslice became involved with gang culture and started using drugs as he rose in the lowrider world. He eventually became addicted to crystal methamphetamine. 

But after three felony convictions, Vanderslice quit drugs. He’s now celebrating 13 years of sobriety. 

Vanderslice showed Whitaker his personal car that illustrates his journey, as he says, “out of the darkness, into the light.” 

Parked outside his workshop, Vanderslice’s 1996 Cadillac Fleetwood sparkled in the sun, metallic flakes gleaming throughout the paint job. 

He said the car’s changing hues, going from dark colors on one side to light colors on the other, represent his life experience.

“I got the oranges, the reds, [and] violets on one side. And then this whole side is all…blue, magentas, violets… basically describing my life change out of the darkness, into the light. My past, and then my present.”

Vanderslice even added a unique feature: LED lights embedded in the paint that light up, the bright spots in his life on the other side. 

Through his reporting, Whitaker found lowrider culture has made a similar transition toward positive change. 

“The culture is changing… it’s moving away from its past and becoming more about helping the community develop,” he said. 

Communities like Española, and other parts of Northern New Mexico, experience high rates of crime, drug use, and poverty. And the lowrider community has stepped in to help. 

Vanderslice is now using his artistic talent to mentor young people in the community who may be struggling as he did in his youth.

He teaches them to build and paint lowrider bicycles, which are meant to attract attention – and ride low and slow – like their automotive counterparts.

“It keeps kids out of trouble. Whatever we can do to point people in the opposite direction that we went in, that’s what we’re trying to do now,” he told Whitaker.  

“We’re going from out of the darkness, into the light.”

The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Sarah Shafer Prediger.