COMMENTARY

This year’s push for vouchers and all the culture war hoopla — about the danger of “diversity, equity and inclusion” and outrageous limits on what students can discuss or read about the history of slavery and human sexuality — are not just popping up here and there from school district to school district. Despite that many of us realize all this is not just a mass of spontaneous advocacy, however, story journalism in the popular press tends to highlight the role of culture war leaders in parent groups springing up in one or another little town in Florida or Arizona or Indiana or New Hampshire. It is hard to keep it all in perspective.

In Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization and A Citizen’s Guide to School Privatization and Merchants of Deception: Parent Props and Their Funders, Massachusetts political science professor, Maurice Cunningham has regularly informed us about the far right think tanks and the Astroturf (fake grassroots) parents’ groups like Moms for Liberty, which promote banning books and framing ideological culture war attacks on Critical Race Theory, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” AP American Studies, and classroom discussion of gender and human sexuality.  Cunningham has exposed the dark money and philanthropic investment paying for all the advocacy for school privatization and the culture wars.

Last week, however, in a stunning addition to Cunningham’s work, the Center for Media and Democracy’s Colleen Scerpella released a mass of current information about the think tanks and philanthropies pressuring Republican state legislatures to pass laws banning  diversity, equity,and inclusion in higher education. Scerpella assures readers that the same groups have been promoting legislation to curtail what they claim is left wing bias in K-12 public schools and to discredit public schools altogether as they promote school privatization. None of us needs to remember the names of all of the organizations Scerpella lists, but her piece establishes the shocking scale of the current investment to destroy academic freedom in universities and to undermine the public schools that serve 50 million young people across the United States.  She explains:

“More than 150 bills seeking to undermine academic freedom and intervene in university governance were introduced in state legislatures across the country during 2021-2023. While these bills are typically interpreted as an ‘organic’ consequence of increasing polarization among Americans, the current wave of legislation targeting higher education is a coordinated effort between wealthy elites, a network of right-wing and libertarian think tanks, and Republican politicians at the state level.”

Scerpella’s short piece summarizes the information gathered in a 148 page report published in May, 2024 by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP): “The paper… identifies 11 right-wing and libertarian think tanks responsible for manufacturing the cultural backlash against both K-12 and higher education. A steady stream of papers, op-eds, talking points, public events, and media appearances emanating from these groups have conveyed a false impression of intellectual legitimacy behind their arguments, which conservatives have leveraged for political capital. As a result, the inflammatory narrative that all college and university faculty are ‘liberal,’ biased, ‘woke,’ socialist or Marxist, and hostile to free speech and conservative values has taken hold in the mainstream. Unsurprisingly the think tanks behind these attacks are prominent, influential, and well-connected operatives in the right-wing ecosphere.”

Seven of the 11 groups are part of the State Policy Network (SPN), state-level nonprofit think tanks across the states which collaborate with each other and the American Legislative Exchange Council to promote coordinated political policy along with their own model bills in the state legislatures. The seven SPN agencies specifically identified by AAUP as partners driving the education culture wars are: American Council of Trustees and Alumni, American Legislative Exchange Council, The Heritage Foundation, Idaho Freedom Foundation, James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Manhattan Institute, and the Texas policy Foundation.

Scerpella continues: “In addition, eight of the 11 highlighted think tanks sit on the advisory board of Project 2025, a series of proposals from The Heritage Foundation outlining the sweeping authoritarian and Christian nationalist reforms conservatives expect to see if Trump is elected this year. They are: American Council of Trustees and Alumni, American Legislative Exchange Council, Center for Renewing America/Conservative Partnership Institute, Claremont Institute, Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Heritage Foundation, National Association of Scholars/Civics Alliance, and Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Scerpella adds that the long report from AAUP also identifies “the top 25 donors to the 11 think tanks and SPN between 2020 and 2022,” including: the Roe Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Leonard Leo’s 85 Fund, the Walton Family Foundation, Stand Together Fellowships (formerly the Charles Koch Institute), the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, the Bradley Impact Fund, and the John William Pope Foundation.

“However, a majority of funding for SPN and the think tanks comes from donor-advised funds, which means that the origin of the funds — the actual donor—is completely obscured.  Donors Trust, the preferred donor-advised funding conduit of right-wing billionaire families, is by far the biggest donor. Between 2020 and 2022, it contributed more than $37 million to 10 of the 11 think tanks and SPN.”

Scerpella explains that the AAUP report tracks the attack on educators back to the summer of 2020, when Christopher Rufo, “appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to disparage the concept of critical race theory (CRT) and call for an executive order banning professors from teaching it. The day after that appearance, Trump called Rufo to discuss the specifics of the executive order.”  In September Trump signed Executive Order 13950, which, “made it illegal for federal agencies to incorporate ‘divisive concepts,’ ‘race or sex stereotyping,’ and ‘race or sex scapegoating’ into their training protocols… With millions of dollars in financial backing, right-wing and libertarian think tanks mobilized around promoting a reactionary legislative response to the ‘liberal excesses’ of higher education.”

Scerpella continues: “The legislative backlash began with ‘academic gag orders,’ or bills seeking to ban CRT and other  so-called ‘divisive concepts.’ The AAUP white paper found that all but 19 of the 99 academic gag orders introduced in state houses between 2021 and 2023 drew on language taken directly from EO 13950, or from two model bills, the ‘Model School Board Language to Prohibit Critical Race Theory’… and Heritage’s ‘Protecting K-2 Students from Discrimination’… Despite enthusiastic support from Republican politicians for these academic gag orders, only 10 of the 99 initially introduced passed between 2021 and 2023.”

At that point the strategy changed: “As a result, conservative activists refocused their efforts and shifted their framing. During the 2023 legislative session alone, anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bills were introduced in various states 40 separate times…. Academic gag orders and anti-DEI bills have undoubtedly been the centerpieces of the Right’s manufactured backlash against higher education. However, other types of bills have also been promoted and introduced in state legislatures, including ones that weaken tenure and accreditation standards, and others that undermine existing academic governance.”

Scerpella adds that Christopher Rufo, “has held (or currently holds) positions at the Claremont Institute, Heritage, the Pacific Research Institute, The Federalist Society, and the Manhattan Institute.”

While the American Association of University Professors’ report understandably focuses on higher education, throughout her report, Scerpella shows how the massive far right attack has undermined K-12 public schools as well. Scerpella concludes her report by quoting the author of AAUP’s 148-page report, Isaac Kamola, who warns: “It is important to follow the money when examining the culture war attack on higher education… The goal of plutocrats and billionaires has been to paint all higher education as threatening to American values because the end goal is defunding all public goods. Attacking… education not only scores short-term political points but also paves the road for delegitimizing all public institutions.”

R E L A T E D:

Who Is Writing the Model Bills Against CRT?

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Jan Resseger writes regularly about public education issues. Read the original article here.