Biography and lecture
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born writer, political activist, and former Dutch parliamentarian known for her advocacy of women’s rights, freedom of speech, and liberal democratic values, as well as for her outspoken criticism of political Islam.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969, Hirsi Ali spent much of her childhood in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya after her family went into exile. Raised in a devout Muslim household, she was subjected to female genital mutilation as a young child. In 1992, facing an arranged marriage, she fled to the Netherlands, where she received asylum, learned Dutch, and earned a master’s degree in political science from Leiden University.
Hirsi Ali entered Dutch politics and served in parliament from 2003 to 2006 as a member of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). Her work concentrated on immigration, integration, women’s rights, forced marriage, honor violence, and female genital mutilation. She attracted international attention in 2004 after collaborating with filmmaker Theo van Gogh on Submission, a short film criticizing the treatment of women under certain interpretations of Islam. Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist extremist shortly afterward, and a death threat against Hirsi Ali was left on his body. She subsequently lived under extensive security protection.
After leaving Dutch politics, Hirsi Ali moved to the United States. In 2007 she founded the AHA Foundation, which campaigns against female genital mutilation, forced marriage, honor violence, and other practices that restrict the rights of women and girls. She became an American citizen in 2013 and is currently a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Her books include Infidel (2007), an account of her early life and break with Islam; Nomad (2010); Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015); and Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (2021). Her arguments about Islam, immigration, multiculturalism, and Western liberalism have made her both an influential and a controversial public intellectual.[1]
Hirsi Ali’s intellectual and religious development has taken an unusual course. After leaving Islam, she became a prominent atheist and associated with figures such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. In 2023, however, she announced that she had become a Christian, explaining the change in both personal and civilizational terms. She argued that Christianity provided a source of spiritual meaning that she had not found in atheism and that the Judeo-Christian tradition was important to the survival of Western liberal civilization.[2]
Today, Hirsi Ali continues to write and speak about Islamism, religious freedom, women’s rights, immigration, free expression, and the cultural foundations of Western society. She publishes on Substack, and a book titled Why I Am Now a Christian is planned for publication in 2027.[1][3]
A Brief History of the University of Austin (UATX)
The University of Austin (UATX) is a private, nonprofit university in Austin, Texas, founded in 2021 in response to concerns that American higher education had become increasingly hostile to intellectual dissent, open inquiry, and civil disagreement. Its founders sought to create a new institution organized around academic freedom and what the university calls the “fearless pursuit of truth.”
The idea took shape in May 2021, when a group including Pano Kanelos, Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and Heather Heying met in Austin to discuss the possibility of building a new university. Kanelos, formerly president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, became the institution’s founding president. UATX was formally incorporated in Texas in July 2021 and publicly announced on November 8, 2021.[4]
Before enrolling undergraduates, UATX experimented with short-form educational programs, including its Forbidden Courses, designed to encourage discussion of controversial subjects that participants might hesitate to explore elsewhere. From the beginning, the university attracted considerable attention because of its prominent founders and advisers and because its creation was explicitly presented as a response to perceived problems within established universities. Supporters viewed it as an experiment in institutional reform; critics questioned whether it would become an ideologically defined alternative to the universities it criticized.
In 2023, Texas authorities granted UATX the power to award degrees. By then the university reported having raised approximately $200 million in private donations. It opened its undergraduate program in downtown Austin in the fall of 2024, welcoming an inaugural class of 92 students. Its curriculum combines a Great Books-style liberal education with mathematics, science, technology, entrepreneurship, and practical training.[5]
In June 2025, statistician Carlos M. Carvalho, formerly a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, became UATX’s second president. On August 28, 2025 the Middle States Commission on Higher Education granted UATX candidate status for accreditation, an important step toward full institutional accreditation. Candidate status is not full accreditation. The university continues to operate without federal funding and covers tuition through privately funded scholarships.[6][7]
Still a very young institution, UATX represents an unusual experiment in American higher education: rather than attempting to reform an established university from within, its founders chose to build a new one around principles of intellectual pluralism, open debate, academic rigor, and institutional independence.
Our Crisis of Antisemitism & Islamism
Here is a remarkable video, approximately one hour and ten minutes long, of Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaking at the University of Austin (UATX) in Austin, Texas, on April 4, 2025. The university published the recording on YouTube on April 11, 2025, under the title Our Crisis of Antisemitism & Islamism | Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Her lecture is followed by questions from UATX students.[9]
Hirsi Ali is a member of the university’s Board of Advisors.[8]
