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CONSERVATIVE PHILANTHROPYTargeting the AcademyFrom a report by NCRPConservative foundations have also worked through their grantees in a sustained effort to reverse progressive policy and curricula trends on college and university campuses and to influence the flow of money to higher education institutions. This effort has involved a highly organized and multi-faceted campaign to manufacture and perpetuate a "crisis of the academy" in order to stimulate concern and action among public sector funders, private donors, and education consumers. As indicated above, funders have created and heavily supported academic change organizations and networks whose fundamental mission is to "take back" the universities from scholars and academic programs regarded either as too hostile to free markets or too critical of the values and history of Western civilization. This agenda was clearly articulated by T. Kenneth Cribb, president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, who stated in a lecture to the Heritage Foundation: "We must ... provide resources and guidance to an elite which can take up anew the task of enculturation. Through its journals, lectures, seminars, books and fellowships, this is what ISI has done successfully for 36 years. The coming age of such elites has provided the current leadership of the conservative revival. But we should add a major new component to our strategy: the conservative movement is now mature enough to sustain a counteroffensive on that last Leftist redoubt, the college campus... We are now strong enough to establish a contemporary presence for conservatism on campus, and contest the Left on its own turf. We plan to do this by greatly expanding the ISI field effort, its network of campus-based programming." Funders also have heavily supported the writing and dissemination of books attacking "liberalized higher education," including Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1986); Charles J. Syke's Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (1988); Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990), and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education (1990). These books followed, built on and extended earlier attacks launched initially by the National Endowment of the Humanities, led by then-chairman, William Bennett, who had helped to set the stage for an expanded assault on progressive humanities scholarship with NEH's publication of To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education. The Olin Foundation has provided direct or indirect support for all of the works by Bloom, Kimball and D'Souza. According to a report prepared for the National Council for Research on Women, print media coverage of the debates began with a slow but steady trickle of articles about "political correctness" on college campuses in the 1988 to 1990 period, with 101 articles appearing in 1988 and increasing to 656 in 1990. Then, however, the number of articles skyrocketed, with 3,989 articles appearing in 1991, a 500 percent increase over the year before. Reflecting perhaps conservative successes in creating the appearance of crisis, "one of the most noticeable common denominators in these articles was their reliance -apparently unchallenged by first-hand reporting or by other journalists - on a relatively small number of campus incidents, often the same few, to bolster the case for an alleged epidemic of suppression." Once the idea of "political correctness" became fixed in the public mind, funders supported both the individual and institutional efforts launched by political conservatives to redirect public and private sector dollars from "liberal" higher education purposes toward conservative ones. They had the support of Lynne V. Cheney, a current grantee who served as Bennett's successor at NEH between 1986 and 1993. While at NEH, Cheney extended Bennett's crusade against politically correct education, staffing the upper echelons of the NEH with neo-conservative supporters and opposing NEH funding of nontraditional approaches to the humanities. Cheney departed with the election of Bill Clinton, prompting conservative donors and grantees to refocus some of their strategies, particularly in the funding arena. In 1993, conservatives, with the funding support of the Bradley, Olin and Scaife Foundations, organized a symposium at New York University, the targets of which were the National Endowment of the Humanities and the National Endowment of the Arts. The proceedings, subsequently published by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, outlined the new lines of attack. They accused the endowments of supporting projects of questionable intellectual, artistic or moral value, and attacked them for allegedly inefficient funding operations. The developing argument was that the endowments' activities represented an extreme misuse of taxpayers' money and that consumer (or market) demand, not government programs, should dictate which projects get support and which do not. Herbert London, the founder and chairman of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), raised the charge of govemment's irresponsible use of tax revenue. In his view, President Lyndon Johnson had intended that the Great Society support the arts and humanities through the endowments, established in 1965. "At this juncture, it was assumed that spending money would inexorably lead to fine art and notable scholarship," London said, arguing that that had not proved true, "yet the money mill is still in service, and those who reap its rewards refuse to examine the abuses in this government system." Not surprisingly, this critique developed, by 1995, into a full-blown legislative attack on the funding of both the NEH and the NEA, with proposals to cut appropriations between 30 and 60 percent and eventually to terminate the agencies altogether. At the same time, other privately-funded efforts were underway to steer donors to more traditional educational institutions or academic pursuits. With the support of conservative funders, conservative academic change organizations like ISI have created new "counter-institutions" to support restructuring efforts. In 1994, ISI established the National Alumni Forum (now the American Council of Trustees and Alumni), whose mission is to "organize alumni support for academic freedom and challenge practices and policies that threaten intellectual freedom and undermine academic standards. Alumni giving - at $2.9 billion annually and growing (1994) - is the largest private source of financial support for higher education. The Forum will help alumni direct their giving to programs that will raise educational standards at their alma maters." The Bradley and Olin foundations provided the seed money to get the NAF up and running. Directed by Lynne Cheney, the NAF recently (1997) launched a national advertising campaign to "outline troubles in higher education" and to give visibility to its newly created vehicle for alumni giving, the Fund for Academic Renewal. The campaign is placing one-third page advertisements in the Ivy League alumni magazines encouraging alumni to contact the NAF and to use the NAF's Fund for Academic Renewal to help them target their gifts rather than allowing their alma maters to spend money without "donor input." The coordinated nature of these efforts reflects the willingness of conservative foundations and their academic sector grantees to practice what Ellen Messer-Davidow has quite aptly called "real politics." She contrasts (and criticizes) progressive intellectuals and faculty members for their failure to grasp the hardball political nature of institutions like ISI and NAS. Progressive scholars, she argues, have largely responded to the right's attack on higher education on intellectual grounds, as if the higher education was a "bounded enterprise" unaffected by larger political forces. The misguided view that "intellectual activity is somehow insulated from the scuffles of partisan politics" is a logic that fails to describe the "the real world -where conservatives attack cultural, social and economic programs; where they deploy wedge strategies to fracture traditional categories of privileged/oppressed; and where they use institutions every which way - establishing, maintaining, reforming, and transforming them to achieve their political ends."
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Max Blumenthal Princeton Tilts Right.But there is another side to [Robert] George, less tolerant, ferociously partisan and intimately connected to wealthy organizations that wish explicitly to inject their politics into the universities--a side better known by Beltway Republicans and right-wing Christian activists than on the long green lawns of Princeton.
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