There exists on the American right a handful of what I will call alternative higher education programs, or alt higher ed. These programs have much in common with the conservative academic institutes that have been springing up on college campuses in recent years. Both are dissatisfied with the way political and historical subjects tend to be taught at American universities. Both also receive considerable sums from conservative donors.
Yet alt higher ed has its own unique attributes. Importantly, it serves an organizational function on the American right that has no equivalent on the left, and this fact highlights a deeper set of asymmetries that distinguish conservative and progressive politics in the United States. Unlike most forms of political activism, which use donations to fortify organizational capacity (e.g., campaigns, lobbying efforts, presidential administrations), alt higher ed exists to pursue a longer-term goal: developing and coordinating intellectual talent within the conservative movement. From the standpoint of supporters and donors, alt higher ed is therefore a more oblique, but also a potentially more lasting and consequential, form of political intervention.
Alt higher ed exists to pursue a long-term goal: developing and coordinating intellectual talent within the conservative movement.
The Basic Model
The three most notable programs of this kind are the Hudson Institute’s Political Studies Program, the Hertog Foundation’s Political Studies Program, and the Claremont Institute’s Publius Fellowship. Each program has its own features, but all three conform to the same basic model. I attended two of these programs when I was a student: Hertog in 2015 and Claremont in 2017. I had positive experiences at both and would recommend them to anyone interested in the conservative intellectual space.
These programs’ explicit mission is to expose participants to leading academics, public intellectuals, and political practitioners, all or most of whom hail from the right or center-right.
Hosting college students, early graduate students, and young professionals, and taking place for several weeks every summer, these programs offer themselves as correctives to the standard social science-based curricula typically found in universities. In contrast, their curricula are organized chiefly around “Great Books” such as Aristotle’s Politics, Plato’s Republic, and The Federalist Papers, as well as primary source political and policy documents. Their explicit mission is to expose participants to leading academics, public intellectuals, and political practitioners, all or most of whom hail from the right or center-right. Conservative luminaries listed as faculty participants or speakers on their websites include Senator Tom Cotton, William Barr, Harvey Mansfield, Mike Pompeo, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Matthew Continetti, Mike Gallagher, Elliott Abrams, and Walter Russell Meade. Prominent centrist and center-left figures also appear, though infrequently. Hudson lists William Galston and Congressman Seth Moulton, for example, and Hertog lists Thomas Chatterton Williams.
Students selected to participate will have passed an intensive application process consisting of multiple components: essay, writing sample, academic transcripts, and recommendations. Additionally, Hertog interviews all finalists before selection and accepts nominations from faculty. Participants take classes, attend talks and formal lectures, and generally socialize with each program’s particular political and intellectual milieu. Funded by donors, the programs recruit from top universities nationwide; they come with comfortable living accommodations and generous stipends. Their alumni networks are concentrated in law, journalism, and politics.
Disrupting Liberalism
Readers acquainted with American political history will not be surprised to hear that alt higher ed traces its intellectual and organizational roots to a broader complex of conservative civil society organizations that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century in response to the overwhelming successes of the New Deal Movement. During this period, conservatives were attempting to mobilize in opposition to the various strands of American liberalism, particularly organized labor, racial and gender equity, bureaucratic expansion, and criminal justice reform. Conservatives were looking for opportunities to contest and disrupt the New Deal’s perceived hegemony, not just in electoral politics but in all areas of public life, including business, law, and higher education. As Calvin TerBeek has argued and will show in a forthcoming book, these organizations were originally conceived to function as parallel institutions, offering a conservative alternative to their allegedly more legitimate, acceptable liberal counterparts.
Though their expressed goal was to disrupt liberal hegemony in prominent institutions, many of these organizations rose to prominence at the very moment that American liberalism found itself in peak disarray, during the 1970s and 80s. As John Ganz has shown, notwithstanding a series of stunning Republican electoral victories during this period, these organizations insisted that liberalism remained deeply entrenched in the broader American culture and needed to be pulled out root and branch.
The programs that constitute alt higher ed today are heirs of this tradition, even though they rose to prominence after the high-water mark of American liberalism in the 1950s and 60s. The Claremont Institute’s Publius Fellowship hosted its inaugural class of just two fellows in 1979, and today their classes typically range from ten to fifteen fellows. (Claremont also offers three additional summer programs: the Lincoln Fellowship for mid-career professionals, the Marshall Fellowship for attorneys, and the Sherrif Fellowship for, well, sheriffs.) Both the Hudson and Hertog Programs started in the 2010s.
The Claremont, Hertog, and Hudson programs are embedded in a broader network of similar alternative educational programs on the right that take place outside the university. These include paid internship programs (such as those offered by Heritage and AEI) as well as weekend and single-day workshops offered by conservative think tanks in the Washington, D.C. area. Also relevant are the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (or ISI) and the Jack Miller Center (which targets career academics). What makes the Claremont, Hudson, and Hertog programs unique is that they are aimed at undergraduates, they are exclusively off-campus, and there is no liberal or progressive equivalent to them. The Brookings Institute and the Center for American Progress, for example, both offer paid internships, and D.C. is replete with meetups for college students and young professionals on the left. But no one offers a multi-week, fully-funded educational program that is replete with political luminaries, and that demands nothing from undergraduate students (no labor, no commitments) other than that they show up and participate. Such an opportunity is truly unique and a boon for a young professional trying to get a foothold in the political world.
What makes these programs unique is that they are aimed at undergraduates, they are exclusively off-campus, and there is no liberal or progressive equivalent to them.
Funding Alt Higher Ed
As noted, each of these programs is funded by private donors; each is also run by a larger organization that qualifies for 501c(3) status under the IRS Code. Donations to 501c(3) organizations are tax-deductible. The Hertog Program, for example, is funded by the private Hertog Foundation, for which Roger Hertog is the donor. During fiscal year 2023, tax filings on Hertog’s IRS 990 “Private Foundation” form show that Hertog contributed several donations ranging from $93,578 to $3,251,856. In contrast, Hudson and Claremont are not private foundations and instead receive funds from a range of donors, such as those listed on Hudson’s website.
Running a single summer program costs upwards of a million dollars per year. According to publicly available tax documents, the Claremont Institute spent $704,000 during fiscal year 2022 from a fund established by a donor; a portion of that money was awarded to the recipient of a prize conferred by the Institute; the rest funded its three-week Publius Fellowship, in which there were 14 participants. (Claremont also spent $1,016,169 on other programs, including the Lincoln and Marshall Fellowships mentioned above.) The Hertog Foundation reported spending $598,485 on its six-week Political Studies Program in fiscal year 2023 (These amounts do not include salaries of officers who run the programs, which are itemized separately.) As for Hudson, its tax reports did not itemize the amount spent on the Institute’s six-week program. However, it did report that in the 2023 fiscal year, $4,257,572 was spent on programming that included “political studies”; presumably, a portion of this was spent on the summer “political studies” program.
In the grand sweep of American electoral politics—which includes campaign donations and direct lobbying efforts—these expenses are a drop in the bucket. For example, a single Congressional campaign averaged $2.79 million in 2022. But presumably, direct campaign spending would be a more efficacious way to impact partisan politics. What, then, are the incentives at play here?
The obvious response is that these programs advance ideological goals that conservative donors share. A curriculum based on traditional texts and exposure to conservative thought-leaders will translate—donors might infer—more or less directly into a phalanx of young conservative activists. However, none of these programs explicitly identifies itself with the conservative political movement, instead describing its mission with reference to a fairly vague set of values and aspirations. Perhaps that is simply because the IRS Code forbids 503c(3) organizations from engaging in direct support of political parties (these rules are vague and can be exploited). It could also be that the organizations see their purposes to be genuinely non-partisan.
From a funder’s perspective, what is the value-added of a few weeks of exposure to this kind of educational experience? For activist donors, funding such a program would seem like a rather indirect way of influencing politics, especially given that, as noted above, these programs do not explicitly identify themselves with a particular political movement (even though they clearly signal conservative politics). On the other hand, for donors interested in higher education more generally, it seems odd to fund a program that students will be exposed to for a maximum of several weeks during a summer. Why not concentrate your energies on the universities themselves, where students spend the bulk of their time?
The Function of Alt Higher Ed: Two Possibilities
Political scientists tell a few different stories about the connection between politics and higher education in America that can plausibly explain the existence of these programs; I want to focus on two in particular. Neither gets it exactly right, but both, I think, point in the right direction.
From a party-building standpoint, alt higher ed looks like an attempt at destabilizing, and possibly displacing, perceived Democratic Party dominance in American cultural institutions.
From a party-building standpoint, alt higher ed looks like an attempt at destabilizing, and possibly displacing, perceived Democratic Party dominance in American cultural institutions. As Stephen Skowronek showed in his classic study of American state building, the truly architectonic transformation of the American polity began well before the New Deal, during the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scholars like Eldon Eisenach have shown how the Progressives envisioned, and in some sense succeeded at implementing, comprehensive changes in the American polity that extended beyond electoral politics and reached into the domain of civil society. As Eisenach notes, the Progressives denied the existence of a “neutral” public sphere; for them, “the issues were whose horizon, whose hegemony, which way of life” (my italics). Higher education was part of that change, and to a large degree, the modern university system is a product of the Progressive vision.
Broadly, the Progressives were motivated by a desire to equip the American national state with the power and know-how to implement social, political, and economic justice in an industrialized world. They viewed traditional American institutions—including universities—as inadequate to that challenge on account of their formalism and provincialism: they were insufficiently responsive to the needs of a dynamic and changing society, instead counseling individual responsibility and compliance with traditional norms and values. In contrast, a progressive University would equip experts in all areas of policymaking not just with technical skills but also with convictions associated with Progressivism, such as a belief in equality, social justice, and an activist state. The Progressives were, as Eisenach describes, the “creators of [the roles of] university professor and journalist-critic as social guardians and social critics—replacing the New England clergy as the high priests of the religion of the American Way of Life.”
From this perspective, we can think of alt higher ed programs as an attempt to disrupt not just the policy commitments of the progressive state but the intellectual foundations of those commitments. Insofar as universities support and conform to the broader mission of progressive governance, alternative educational programs embody an effort to re-politicize a broadly accepted structure and reorient higher education toward anti-progressive goals. Thus, seminars at the Hertog Program invite students to “consider the proper education of the ambitious soul” and to consider “what elevates [statesmanship] above ordinary political leadership.” Similarly, Claremont states that “the Publius Fellowship was designed to instill in new generations of Americans [the] same attention to the higher principles of politics” as was practiced by the leaders of the American Revolution.
At the same time, the idea that higher ed is structurally progressive is itself a contestable proposition. Some might argue that modern higher ed has a deeply conservative function: that of generating both personnel and intellectual resources necessary to preserve a neoliberal capitalist order. The “progressive” university, with its focus on technical expertise, social science, and credentialism, is not the engine of revolutionary change but instead the factory of what scholars like Catherine Liu have called the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), whose role it is to discipline labor and manage production across global consumer markets and supply chains. From this perspective, it is actually the alt higher ed programs who have revolutionary ambitions, insofar as they aim to dethrone both the professional norms and academic skillset associated with the elites who run modern institutions.
The idea that higher ed is structurally progressive is itself a contestable proposition.
Nuanced Impacts
In the final analysis, I think alt higher ed serves organizational purposes related to, but also somewhat more specific and nuanced than, those described in these literatures.
The value-add of alt higher ed is its ability to identify and influence future elites who will confer intellectual legitimacy on conservative political priorities within their respective professional networks.
Broadly speaking, I think the intervention, or value-add, of alt higher ed is its ability to identify and influence future elites who will confer intellectual legitimacy on conservative political priorities within their respective professional networks. The impact is targeted, rather than scattershot, so as to recruit and polish talent that, ideally, will have outsized influence on elite networks that overlap multiple professional-political sectors, like law, journalism, business, and electoral politics. To this end, one can glimpse the successes that Claremont and Hertog have had on their respective alumni pages. For its part, Hudson states this goal in so many words on its website:
Hudson Institute Political Studies seeks to educate future leaders, whether in government or in their local community, whether in academia, business, law or public service, in the philosophic and civic tradition upon which freedom and equality depend.
Given this goal, recruitment is decisive. I noted earlier that all three programs entail a complex application and vetting process, including multi-part applications, recommendations, and in some cases, nominations and interviews. Officials involved in the selection process, therefore, have numerous opportunities to identify whether applicants are desirable.
Given the goals I have described, can we infer what makes an applicant desirable?
On the one hand, each of these programs presents itself as something more sophisticated than a partisan indoctrination exercise. In some sense, they are all oriented towards the theory of conservative politics—not merely talking points or the technical means by which conservative policies are implemented. In turn, a preoccupation with theory entails openness to a range of intellectual, and practical, outcomes; students might emerge from these programs with different—perhaps very different—conclusions about how to think and act politically. Hudson, for example, describes itself as “dedicated to the principles of liberal education.”
On the other hand, a concern with theory does not necessarily entail an agnostic disposition regarding the kinds of effects these programs will have on their students in the aggregate. If the occasional student enters the program as a progressive and leaves with their progressive commitments intact, no problem. But if program alumni consistently started popping up at places like the Center for American Progress, or at Ilhan Omar’s Congressional campaign, or at Students for Justice in Palestine, it seems reasonable to think that their donors would be displeased.
We might generalize further and say that, given how these programs describe themselves and whom they employ as faculty, there is clearly a zone of intended public impact each is aiming for. If students begin to diverge from that zone reliably—perhaps by espousing the wrong kinds of beliefs or taking the wrong kinds of jobs afterwards—program stakeholders will feel that their goals were not being advanced.
Given these inferences, I think we can draw a few preliminary conclusions about the purposes that these programs intend to advance through recruitment.
The first is that they do not wish to recruit only true believers—that is, students who have already been exposed to relevant conservative intellectual systems and who are committed to conservative politics. Presumably, if such students are ambitious, they will advance within the conservative hierarchy on their own; resources spent on them by a Hudson or Claremont program will be redundant. Instead, the ideal recruit for alt higher ed is in some ways the intelligent, ambitious student whose political commitments are underdetermined, and who can be reoriented in the desired trajectory by means of a well-timed nudge: several weeks of intensive study in a hospitable, generous environment.
A second type of desirable recruit is one who is ideologically committed, yet whose conservative ideas lack depth and sophistication. Alt higher ed can benefit, and benefit from, this kind of student by substantiating and legitimizing the ideological commitments they already hold. This kind of education will make it more likely that students will advance in elite circles that select for articulateness and sophistication. It will also make it more likely that students will remain politically “on side” as they make their way in their respective professional circles, instead of drifting from core conservative priorities as they encounter different ideologies and perspectives.
A third kind of recruit is one who currently lacks access to a professional network proportional to their ambitions and intellectual abilities. These students might not benefit from classroom training as much as others will—perhaps they have already encountered such ideas at their own university—but they will benefit immensely from making contacts in the program’s professional milieu. They will also learn more about the various paths of advancement that are open to them.
Is Alt Higher Ed Replicable on the Left?
An obvious answer to why the left does not have its own alt higher ed is that normal higher ed already performs party-building functions adequately. That claim is highly contestable; it is also problematic if true, given that, presumably, higher education in a society that is at least trying to be free should amount to something more than the training ground for a political party.
A couple of considerations follow from what I have said here, a full discussion of which is beyond the scope of this essay.
First, there is (in principle at least) no reason the left could not establish its own version of the Hertog, Hudson, or Claremont programs. The money is certainly there and would only require some convincing to be made effectual. As regards the impact of such a program on the left, one wonders if the progressive movement in the United States could use an infusion of ambitious young professionals who have been exposed, or re-exposed, to classical leftist texts such as Rousseau’s Social Contract, Marx’s Capital, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.
Second, one wonders if alt higher ed is flourishing in part because the modern university has, to some extent, deprioritized the study of social and political thought. By leaning too heavily on STEM at the expense of foundational liberal arts books—one might speculate—universities have created an opening for conservatives looking to monopolize the study of “Great Books” for their own political cause. Improvements on this front must begin with recognizing, and arguing, that there is nothing inherently conservative or right-wing about the study of classic texts.
Charles U. Zug is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Kinder Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. He has authored two books, Demagogues in American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Federal Highway Act (University Press of Kansas, 2024), as well as numerous articles.
Image: “Great Books,” by User:Rdsmith4 licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.
