Exposing and Resisting the Coordinated Attacks on Higher Education

The second wave is the anti-DEI bills, starting in 2023, [that then] became a defining part of the 2024 legislative cycle as well. Those are not trying to police speech in the classroom per se, because of First Amendment considerations, but instead try to reshape what services schools provide to students. These bills claim that talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and how to create more just education institutions are ideological political projects that brainwash students.^[5]

We also look at bills attacking tenure and accreditation, two institutional processes created to protect universities from external pressure (i.e., from becoming an extension of political power). Those bills, such as SB 7044 and SB 266 in Florida; and SB 18 Texas, actively undermine those institutional protections, making it more possible to gain political influence through higher education.^[6]

The last group of bills are those that seek to mandate content. Academic centers are set up by right-wing activist boards, like the School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC Chapel Hill.^[7] They use state legislators to teach civics or leadership in a Western Civilization framework.^[8] They use legislature and boards to create institutions [with] donor- and politician-preferred content taught, thereby taking curricular decisions out of the hands of faculty and in the hands of politicians.

Key Players in the Far-Right Ecosystem Against Education

Seeing the arc of these unfold through your analysis is useful to understand how the Right organizes themselves. You focus on eleven think tanks and specific constellations of think tanks in your report. How did you come to identify major players in those different categories of legislation?

When studying the influence of dark-money-funded institutions, the findings [are] always conservative estimates. Because of the way the tax documents work, it’s hard to find all the funders.

But as I was doing a deep dive into the bills and would look at who is writing [them], it’s the same handful of players. The think tanks are platforming fellows who write reports criticizing DEI and CRT. The Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute are prominent think tanks on this particular issue. They have tens of millions of dollars—in the case of Heritage, more than $100 million—and are heavily influential in right-wing libertarian policy circles and some of the most conservative legislation in the last few decades. There’s a lot of scholarship that talks about the funding of these national organizations and the impact that they have on American politics. For example, work by Nancy MacLean, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, among others. ^[9]

There are other groups of think tanks, like state-level think tanks. In the report, we focus on a few, influential state-level think tanks. Texas Public Policy Foundationand the Idaho Freedom Foundation are two.^[10]  There are many more, like the Goldwater Institute in Arizona and the Mackinac Center in Michigan. ^[11]

The report also captures organizations that play a prominent role in the culture war backlash in higher education, but a much more behind-the-scenes rolewith specialized areas of expertise. For example, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) specializes in normalizing the argument that administrators—rather than faculty—should have more authority over what goes on in higher education. Through a culture war [tactic of] disparaging faculty, ACTA tries to replace the shared governance model where professors possess almost complete autonomy over curriculum, e.g. what gets taught and how it gets taught.^[12] ACTA professionalizes an argument that says administrators who are the adults in the room should play a more active role in making decisions in higher education. And they’ve been very influential!They’re quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education often. They’re on major boards and they do trainings with trustee groups and boards of governors, etc.^[13]

Lastly, I look at another organization: the State Policy Network (SPN). SPN grew out of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and is the de facto legislation mill model that the Right set up to crank out anti-union, anti-Medicare, anti-social security, pro-voucher, pro-concealed carry bills. [The Right] realized that if they were going to generate state-level policy, they needed help implementing it in states. SPN is a kind of a “think tank of think tanks” that brings together the hundreds of national, state-level and specialized think tanks in an integrated, networked way that serves as a vehicle for funding and [integrated] communications, focusing on accreditation, litigation, journalism, and other areas of expertise.

It’s helpful to think of SPN as a deeply organized and integrated political infrastructure. Without recognizing this subterranean infrastructure, it looks like there’s just a think tank in Idaho, the Claremont Institute over here, etc. [But SPN is] funded through dark money, and it’s intentionally designed to look less connected than it is.

The Constructed Culture War against Racial Justice in Higher Education

The Left is aware of how coordinated the Right is, but the nature and level of that coordination is often less understood. How were you able to see those connections? Walk us through how you came to research the U.S. Right’s creation of anti-CRT and anti-DEI policies and messaging.

In June of 2017, there was an incident at Trinity College where a right-wing news outlet wrote about my colleague, Prof. Johnny Eric Williams. He had made a Facebook post critiquing institutionalized racism.^[14] This post led to threats of violence. My phone started blowing up with emails and texts telling me I had to evacuate campus. I found out that these threats were the result of a story written by this outlet called Campus Reform, which is a project of Leadership Institute, which is a member of the SPN. Campus Reform trains and funds students to be right-wing provocateurs and activists on college campuses.

When looking into who funds this group, I met Ralph Wilson, who was then with UnKoch My Campus, and Sam Parsons, both of whom [work] to understand the influence of dark money in American politics.^[15] We recognized that, while there are millions of Facebook posts every day that do not end up on Fox News, this one ended up on Fox News for a very particular reason. That reason was because there was a political infrastructure in place to generate outrage against people like my colleague, a Black sociologist.^[16]

This got me thinking about campus protests from 2017 through 2019 against, for example, Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro. Wilson came to me with his research about dark money in higher education that demonstrated how the careers of the provocateurs like Yiannopoulos do not exist without a Robert Mercer, the hedge fund financier who funded Cambridge Analytica and is a regular attendee of the Koch donor summits. ^[17] If you take out Mercer, Yiannopoulos disappears. Thus, this is a very small but well-funded political network that shapes how people are talking about [and experiencing] higher education.

The manufactured narrative that professors are indoctrinating and brainwashing students in the classroom and that students are woke and coddled, for example, is a narrative that then gets baked into public discourse. We see the effect, again today, in the response to the International Court of Justice when they named that Israel’s assault on Gaza likely constitutes a genocide and war crimes.^[18] The narrative that actually plays out in the American media [about students’ pro-Palestine protests] is that these students are out of control and wild. This narrative has been manufactured by right-wing think tanks and media outlets. Wilson and I wrote about the construction of these [kinds of culture war] in Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (Pluto, 2021).

Actions and Approaches for a Political Economy of Liberatory Education

We need to be able to make sense of these social phenomena, or patterns, really, in order to shift them. What do you think the larger and long-run impact is when we use political economic analysis for the U.S. higher education landscape?

As the business model of higher education changes, the knowledge that universities produce also changes. A political economy analysis demonstrates that you can’t understand the ways that U.S. universities became dominant—along with the dominant discourses they produce about globalization—without understanding that liberatory universities unfortunately do not yet exist.

The African anticolonial tradition teaches us that if the goal is to decolonize, how it is that you can collectively come to reimagine the world, [then you can] collectively understand the state, how capitalism works, how identity works, and how to build new economies that are outside of the colonial economic structures. Unlike in the western academy, they’re not abstract questions. African anti-colonial scholars trained in the Global North come back to Algeria, Guinea Bissau, South Africa, and Ghana. They study theory to ask the questions that need answers in order to remake the world. ^[19] The forces that cause harm in the world understand that higher education is valuable and that it’s strategic to occupy. The Right calls it the creation of “beachheads,” [the work] to infiltrate and subvert. ^[20]

The Right’s strategy reflects a recognition that higher education is a valuable institution not only because knowledge [is] exchanged and produced, but also because of the culture and systems that emerge from this knowledge. This reminds me of Paulo Freire’s quote: “Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world.”^[21] Which brings me to the next question. Although this report focuses on the CRT/DEI culture war within formal institutions of learning, there are clear, even dialectical, connections to the Black Lives Matter movement and other formations of power outside the academy. Can these connections advance a pro-CRT, pro-DEI ecosystem and political infrastructure?

I get this kind of question a lot, with people reacting with we need an ALEC or we need a State Policy Network or we need a Heritage Foundation. We shouldn’t replicate the political infrastructure of the Right. Those organizations work with a donor-to-outcome hierarchical model: donors have policy preferences, and create or pay existing institutions to yield the outcome that they want. It’s incumbent on us to defend against that constant barrage of dogmatic messages, but in a way that doesn’t reproduce that kind of hierarchy, certainty, arrogance, and narcissism that the Right uses.

It’s also incumbent to develop ecosystems and political infrastructures that work together and grow together and empower each other, like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic and arboreal structure.^[22] We need to create robust, smart, and agile enough infrastructures and ecosystems to have the political analysis that’s needed for the time.

Right-wing institutions work cynically, and Leftist organizations fall into the traps of reproducing those ideas. That, too, means that you also [need] humility. For example, what we’re seeing now with the reactions to the student protests around Gaza is really scary. They’re saying, Shame on these kids!—as opposed to saying, I’m really curious as to why you’re acting this way. Even if you disagree, there should be a recognition that a more just world includes lots of ideas of people who disagree and trying to figure out how to navigate instead of repressing those.^[23]

We also need a rapid response organization that can predict and forestall a bill. For example, a plagiarism software [could] identify a think tank’s model bill and allow real-time understanding of who’s pumping out this legislation. In my report, I demonstrate that some of the Texas bills would have 150-200 people come out to speak against the bill, but then you’d have five or six people coming out in support from Heritage or Texas Public Policy Foundation. [We need] the tools to map how this network operates in real-time as opposed to eight months later. We need to be able to connect the dots faster. Wilson is doing some really exciting stuff with his Corporate Genome Project. Other folks are following the money.^[24]

Fighting the Far-Right Higher Education Agenda

Can you describe how advocates of CRT and DEI are successfully fighting back, and how others can learn from them as well as from your research?

It’s important that once we are aware of [the Right’s] strategies and political infrastructure, the next step is not to then throw up our hands and say, “There’s nothing that we can do about it.” The report offers a powerful analysis that shows that far-right ideas are actually minoritarian, that need this much infrastructure in order to make them viable. And that actually shows how weak they are.

Think about the DNA of the Right’s arguments: which is that individuals must operate through utility-maximizing decisions, and the goal of government is to get out of the way. People like Robert Mercer think their value is their bank account and have said that people on welfare have negative value because they take resources more than they get.^[25] It’s necessary to counteract this highly individualist, radically anti-social, and empirically false understanding of the world, and articulate a vision of the world that reflects what it means to be a human being in community. Education allows us to envision and articulate that vision. It’s possible to fund that education! The resources are in the hands of the Mercers, Kochs, etc. But [they don’t] have to be in their hands.

Which brings us back to law and policy. Where do you see potential chokepoints in their political influence?

We need to start from the perspective that this is a minoritarian movement that only has impact—certainly a significant impact—because there’s a so-called welfare state of institutions to maintain their “zombie” ideas.^[26] Their ideas [are] heavily subsidized, and that is what works their ideas into policy, onto the Supreme Court, and so on.

These same think tanks have received money from the same funders in order to push voucherization of K-12 education, for example.^[27] Even after decades of pounding on vouchers, 90 percent of Americans still go to public schools. People by and large like their public schools.^[28] Even now with these voucher programs in states like Tennessee,^[29] the people receiving the vouchers are already outside of the public school system. They’re going to the wealthy, White folks who are already taking their kids out of public institutions, and now they’re just getting more money to subsidize that decision.^[30]

Nancy MacLean starts her book Democracy in Chains with an observation of the limits of their political influence.^[31] In 2016 there was that large debate stage of Republican candidates. Almost everybody on that stage was a product of SPN, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise, etc. [Thus] they were connected to libertarian dark money: Scott Walker, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. And they lost to the promise of more Social Security, more benefits, an infrastructure bill, etc. All of these things that were the exact opposite of their agenda!

The question now becomes: how do we respond in real-time to the kinds of arguments that these think tanks are very good at making? In September 2020, at the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests, Christopher Rufo explicitly recognized that, because of this massive democratic uprising, the Right’s narrative strategies of “wokeness” or “cancel culture” were no longer effective. The Right’s strategy became “let’s invent an enemy:” CRT. Rufo created a villain, in which all discussions of race and inequality [are] labeled “Critical Race Theory,” and then describe it as this most ridiculous thing.^[32] This cynical political ploy [requires] stripping language of its actual meaning, refilling it with deeply partisan ideas, and throwing it into the meatgrinder of the right-wing media ecosystem.^[33]

This started changing public debate! Now The New York Times, Washington Post, [etc. are] now talking about CRT—reactively, in the terms that Chris Rufo manufactured! ^[34] Thus, one of the potential chokepoints is for us to be educated about what this manufactured outrage is, to see it in real time and to not fall for it.

Again, [the Left is] more politically aligned as a U.S. society than the Far Right has us believe. We can invoke the anticolonial strategies offered by liberatory education movements in the Global South, and animate the real solidarities built from movements like Black Lives Matter. Their efforts can be defeated.

Thank you for that helpful and hopeful reminder. What has the response been to the report so far?

Many people have told me that it has helped explain phenomena that they’ve experienced on their campus, or in their state. Seeing this big picture mapping provides the context. The other response has been: “Okay, if this is taking place, how do we respond?” That’s the question. And that’s the work.