Trinity College Professor Isaac Kamola, the director of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF), explains that they want to unleash “naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining the legitimacy” of such civics programs.
As I discuss in my book “The Indispensable Right,” there has been a systematic purging of conservative, libertarian, and contrarian voices in higher education in America. This viewpoint intolerance has been fueled by the AAUP, which was created to foster intellectual exchange and diversity.
There has been a nascent effort to restore not just diversity but classic educational influences in higher education. As the father of four, I was appalled by how my kids could literally find no traditional history courses. Even a course on World War II was a study of identity groups during the war with virtually no discussion of the war itself. American political thought is often addressed from the perspective of colonization or white privilege.
Some schools have responded to the demand for more traditional courses with Civics centers. Notably, these centers are often created under the leadership of university presidents to blunt departmental ideological bias and hostility. Not surprisingly, many academics see the effort as threatening and intolerable.
These centers have been hugely successful and a draw for many students and academics marginalized by faculties that run from the left to the far left. These centers can now be found at universities, including the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education and UT Austin’s School of Civic Leadership.
John Sailer reports that Kamola spoke openly about the desire to target these centers. He is quoted as declaring:
“I would really love to see kind of a robust research project on these right-wing centers and individuals—like, naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining the legitimacy. I would love to strategically map who these f—ers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out.”
Sailer further acquired emails sent to a CDAF program fellow, including “brainstorming documents, grant records, and meeting audio recordings”:
“In a brainstorming document, Kamola identifies the centers as a key target. “Bring together faculty from different campuses that have dark money-funded, or legislature-imposed, ‘free enterprise,’ ‘civics,’ or other imposed centers,” the document reads.
In a meeting, Kamola expanded on the idea. “If we’re thinking about a five-year research agenda, I think unmasking, naming, and shaming, and just increasing the political costs and decreasing the legitimacy of these centers is going to be really important,” he said.
Kamola specifically calls out a Charles Koch Foundation initiative. His academic bio highlights his writings on the Koch Foundation and other conservative organizations. He has also joined many professors in denying the “so-called free speech crisis”:
“My teaching and research interest focus on the political economy of higher education, African anticolonial theory, and critical globalization studies. My latest book project, Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (with Ralph Wilson, forthcoming 2021), examines the dark money behind the so-called campus free speech crisis.”
CDAF was created through a grant from the Mellon Foundation, which Kamola shows support for his agenda and allegedly stated that “this is not public, so don’t share this anywhere, please—but that they have approved that or they’re in the process of approving it. They’ve gotten a budget that looks like it may be something like $10 million to create a new organization that would do rapid response.”
John Sailer’s research sheds light on the shadowy world of anti-free-speech grants and groups operating in higher education. I have written for years about the system of grants from the Biden Administration and private foundations that establishes and expands the censorship system. Leading institutions like Stanford University played a critical role in that effort as part of a government-corporate-academic coalition.
The system has functioned like a multiheaded hydra, in which cutting off one head only allows two more to grow back. These censors will not simply walk away and become dentists or bartenders. They have a skill set for censorship, and this is now a profitable industry supporting scores of people who market themselves as “disinformation specialists.”
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.“