There is a university in Texas — the University of Austin — that has quietly done something this island's educational establishment has loudly failed to do for the better part of two years: created a campus where ideas may be challenged, tested, and debated without the ambient dread that one is about to be assigned to an alphabetical track and handed a version of reality calibrated to the letter of one's first name. I mention this not to wound anyone. I mention it because I believe in learning, and I believe that belief is increasingly embattled in New Newmanton.

Of course the school board worked hard on the dual-track system. I have acknowledged this. I acknowledged it in print, in this newspaper, which continues to publish me, and which I note has not invited me to the Superintendent's end-of-year reception for two years running, a fact I raise only in the spirit of completeness. But working hard on a thing is not the same as the thing being good. As this paper reported when the board adopted the arrangement, the system assigns students to entirely separate historical realities based on whether their first name falls before or after the letter N — meaning a student named Aaron receives a categorically different account of the 1929 founding than his sister Nadia. And, as The New Newmanton News subsequently reported, a seventh grader who attempted to synthesize both accounts from traded notes was classified by Board Chair Theodore Weil as a vector of "unsanctioned interdisciplinary exchange." One wonders what the University of Austin's faculty would make of that phrase. One suspects they would recognize it.

What the University of Austin understands — and what Track B advocates and the Coalition for Historical Accuracy have spent eighteen months working to ensure no institution in this commonwealth understands — is that genuine intellectual life requires range. The range at the University of Austin runs, by all accounts, from center-right to far-right, which is admittedly a narrower band than I might personally prefer, but which contains within it a seriousness of purpose that I find clarifying. They are not suppressing student notes. They are not issuing press releases about the "structural integrity" of anything. They are simply asking questions — the kind Weil promised to address "in a future session" fourteen months ago and has not addressed, according to previous coverage in this paper.

I do not expect this column to be well received. My columns rarely are, by the people who have already decided that any position not identical to their own constitutes a founding-era atrocity. But intellectual honesty has never been a popularity contest in New Newmanton, which is, when you think about it, exactly the problem.