faculty & staff

Scott Scheall is Associate Professor of Philosophy & Economics in the Center for Economics, Politics & History. Prior to joining the University of Austin, he taught for fourteen years at Arizona State University. Scott’s research considers the significance of human ignorance for decision-making, particularly in the political realm. He is the author of two books, F. A. Hayek and the Epistemology of Politics: The Curious Task of Economics and Dialogues concerning Natural Politics: A Modern Philosophical Dialogue about Policymaker Ignorance, a unique textbook freely available for use in courses in political philosophy, political science, economics, and political economy. His work has appeared in journals in philosophy, political economy, history of economics, bioethics, and cognitive psychology. Scott is co-editor of Review of the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, and founder, producer, and former co-host of the long-running podcast Smith and Marx Walk into a Bar: A History of Economics Podcast. He occasionally posts and podcasts at his Substack page, The Problem of Policymaker Ignorance.

The Chair is intended to advance the study of censorship and the technological, political, economic, and cultural conditions that lead to the suppression of speech. By exposing students to historical and recent manifestations of censorship, the Chair will facilitate the responsible exercise of free speech in a pluralistic society.

Michael Shellenberger is a best-selling author, a publisher of the Twitter files, and a pro-human environmentalist. He has broken a number of major stories, including San Francisco's supervised drug consumption site and cash incentives for homelessness, FBI misinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop, climate pseudoscience and climate anxiety, and more. As a leading expert on the suppression of speech who testifies and advises governments worldwide, Michael is uniquely qualified to lead UATX in its studies of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech.

“The University of Austin has a mission focused on free and open inquiry, and we want to revitalize that open inquiry, that open debate.”

Mike Shires is Chief of Staff and SVP for Strategy and Operations at UATX as well as a Professor of Economics and Public Policy. He oversees the team developing the nation’s newest and most innovative university, finding new pedagogical and curricular models to prepare students to succeed in today’s dynamic workplace and building an institution that rethinks the administrative model of tomorrow’s university. Their mission is to build a new university that is committed to the pursuit of truth through open dialogue and civil discourse. Before assuming his role at the University of Austin, he served as a professor and a senior administrator at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy for 23 years. He was also the first Research Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and a Doctoral Fellow at the RAND Corporation.

His scholarly work includes higher education governance, finance and design; economic development, K-12 school reform, public finance and the ethics of governance and leadership. His research passion in recent years has been working to preserve economic opportunity for lower and middle income households in the U.S. He has taught public policy analysis, public finance, the economics of education, statistics, urban economics, state and local finance, labor economics, state and local policy, and education policy. He has been a frequent television and radio contributor on political and economic issues and has appeared in numerous media outlets including CNN, Bloomberg TV, The Economist, USA Today, and many local print, radio and television programs. He has a Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, an MBA from the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from UCLA.

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Don Soifer is Chief Executive Officer of the National Microschooling Center, America’s comprehensive resource center, movement-builder and authority for the most exciting new education movement in a generation. He co-created and co-directed the Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy, the nation’s first public–private partnership microschool with the City of North Las Vegas, delivering unprecedented academic growth for that community.
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Soifer previously served as President of Nevada Action for School Options, an award-winning nonpartisan“action tank” he founded in 2017.

He previously served asExecutive Vice President of the Lexington Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Arlington, VA that he cofounded in 1998, where he directed the institute’s education and other domestic-policy research programs.
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Soifer earned a record as one of the nation’s most accomplished charter school authorizers, serving on the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board from 2008-2019and the Nevada State Public Charter School Authority from 2019-2021.

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A lifelong educator and frequent public speaker, Dr. Elizabeth Edwards Spalding is Senior Fellow at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, where she teaches religion and politics, and Visiting Fellow at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel School of Government, where she teaches courses on the American Presidency, Marxism, and statecraft. Spalding serves as Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), where she is also Founding Director of the Victims of Communism Museum, and on the Board of the Institute on Religion and Democracy(IRD). She is the author of The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism and the co-author of A Brief History of the Cold War, and her scholarly and popular articles and reviews have been published widely. Spalding lives with her family in Arlington, VA.

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Jeremy Wayne Tate is the founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test and a national leader in there vival of classical education. He has been featured on Fox News, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and the New York Times. Prior to founding CLT, Jeremy served as Director of College Counseling at Mount de Sales Academy in Catonsville, Maryland.

He received his Bachelor of Science in Secondary Education from Louisiana State University and a Masters in Religious Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary. Jeremy and his wife, Erin, reside in Annapolis, Maryland with their six children. You can find Jeremy on Twitter @JeremyTate41.

Erin Davis Valdez is the Executive Director of the Incubator of the Center for Education and Public Service at the University of Austin. She has been passionate about the transformational power of education all her life, having been given the gift of being homeschooled. She taught for over a decade in Austin-area schools and served as an assistant principal at a charter school in Lewisville. These experiences have given her the opportunity to see first-hand how students can thrive when they have excellent options.

Valdez joined the Charles Koch Foundation in 2015 where she helped to grow a portfolio focused on helping innovative K12 programs grow through higher education and other partnerships. At the Texas Public Policy Foundation, she conducted research on outcomes-based funding at the secondary and postsecondary levels, civics education, and workforce programs in Texas. She has testified before the Texas and U.S. legislatures and shepherded legislation expanding educational choices for K12 and postsecondary students.

Valdez earned an M.A. in Classics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a B.A. in Classical Studies from Hillsdale College. She studied in Athens, Greece her junior year and worked as an excavator at the Agora archaeological site for three seasons.

Valdez has lived in the Austin area (on and off) since 1990, which counts as “native” these days. She enjoys cooking, reading, volunteering, and spending time with her husband Jeremy, her family, friends, and cocker spaniel, Scoops.

Azadeh Vatanpour is a PhD candidate at Emory University. She holds an MA in Ancient Iranian Culture and Languages from Shiraz University, an MA in Folk Studies, and an MA in Religious Studies from Western Kentucky University. As a scholar of religion and minority studies, her research focuses on ethno-religious minority groups in the Middle East, particularly among the Yarsan community.

Vatanpour is currently working on Essays on Gurani Literature, Edited Volume with Dr. Alireza Korangy, delving into the extensive repertoire of literature written in the Gurani language by various ethno-religious groups residing in the Zagros region.

Dr. Ricardo Vilalta is a professor in the Center for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics at the University of Austin. He holds a Master's and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; his research focuses on machine learning, statistical theory, artificial intelligence, and astroinformatics. Dr. Vilalta has received several awards, including a Fulbright scholarship, the Invention Achievement Award from IBM, the Best Paper Award at the European Conference on Machine Learning, and the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. Before UATX, Dr. Vilalta was a professor of computer science at the University of Houston and a researcher at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Dr. Vilalta has published over a hundred papers on AI, machine learning, and its applications.

Jacob Wolf is a founding faculty member of the University of Austin, where he is Assistant Professor of Politics in the Center for Economics, Politics, and History. He was previously Assistant Professor of Government in the Honors College and the College of Arts and Sciences at Regent University, where he also served as the Associate Director of the Lincoln Program in America's Founding Ideals. Before these positions, Jacob was the 2020-2021 John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.  

He received his Ph.D. in political science from Boston College in 2020, double majoring in political theory and American politics. His current research employs insights from those two disciplines to understand contemporary changes in American religious beliefs and practices. In particular, he studies the social and religious ramifications of individualism—especially expressive individualism.  His overall scholarly objective is to demonstrate how ideas and presuppositions about human nature have profound consequences for both individuals and society.

His academic writing has been published in Perspectives on Political Science, Political Science Reviewer, Interpretation, and The Public Discourse. His book manuscript, tentatively-titled "Harmonizing Heaven and Earth," argues that individualism—and not secularization—is responsible for large scale changes in American religion.  He has been awarded scholarly fellowships from The Philadelphia Society, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Jack Miller Center, the Philos Project, and the Institute for Humane Studies.  He is the 2022 recipient of the Jack Miller Center's Award for Excellence in Civic Education as well as the 2018 Donald J. White Award for Teaching Excellence from Boston College.

Dr. Patrick J. Wolf is a Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and the 21^st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas. Recently he served as Interim Head of the Department of Education Reform. He has led influential studies of private school voucher programs in Washington, DC; Milwaukee, WI; the state of Louisiana; and Delhi, India. Research projects led or co-led by Wolf have received 45 research grants and contracts totaling over $23 million.

He has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited five books and over 200 journal articles, book chapters, and policy reports on private school choice, public charter schools, special education, civic values, public management, and campaign finance. Education Week consistently ranks him among the 200 most influential education scholars in the U.S. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN, and his master’s and doctorate from Harvard University.

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Jonathan Yudelman is Assistant Professor of Political Theory in Intellectual Foundations at UATX. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Boston College and from 2020-2024 held postdoctoral positions at Princeton, Harvard, Baylor, and Arizona State University. His current research focuses on early modern political theory, the idea of progress, sources of political authority, and the intersection of politics and religion. His non-academic writing covers topical political, cultural, and religious issues and has appeared in numerous publications. He is currently preparing a book manuscript, Hobbes and the Birth of Ideological Politics.