Over the last two decades, conservatives have championed new civics and leadership institutes associated with high-profile public and private universities. Early examples include the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton (as well as others associated with the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education), the Buckley Institute at Yale, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in North Carolina; a more recent wave includes a number of state-funded initiatives, including the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin.
The mission statements of these institutes promise to offer “classical” and “traditional” humanities curricula to promote civics, leadership, and entrepreneurship. However, every university affiliated with these centers already offers public policy majors, Classics programs, and business schools. Why the redundancy? Many of these programs, especially in that first wave, are unaccredited and unable to confer degrees; so, do they serve much purpose beyond being conservative event spaces?
The right’s approach to higher education has been three-pronged: it has sought to create competing and parallel institutions, to wrest control from existing colleges, and ultimately, to defund public education entirely.
To answer these questions, it’s helpful to situate the sudden proliferation of the institutes in the right’s historic fight to control education. As I show in my book Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (2023), since the early 20th century, business elites and social conservatives have sought dominance in academic halls of power. The right’s approach to higher education has been three-pronged: it has sought to create competing and parallel institutions, to wrest control from existing colleges, and ultimately, to defund public education entirely.
An Old Project
In the 1920s, religious conservatives who were shocked by the scientific consensus around the theory of evolution trailblazed the separatist approach. Bob Jones College (now University) was founded in 1927 by the son of a Confederate veteran who envisioned an evangelical college to serve as a “Christian training center.” Shortly thereafter, anti-New Deal industry magnates provided seed money to create the first free market think tanks, including the Foundation for Economic Education and the American Enterprise Institute.
These research centers produced capitalist educational materials as part of a propaganda war against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Roosevelt’s brain trust, a cadre of academic experts, was behind the President’s Keynesian solutions to the Great Depression. The new conservative groups saw the importance of parallel research institutes to challenge the singular authority of academics on the U.S. economy.
The second approach, to influence the academy from within, was pioneered by self-described right-wing radical thinker Frank Chodorov, who drew his inspiration from battling socialist classmates at Columbia University. Chodorov envisioned a revolution brought about by future generations of conservative professors whom he and his predecessors would train. By the 1950s, he had gathered enough financial backing from sympathetic millionaires to create the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI, now the Intercollegiate Studies Institute).
ISI set out as an academy operating within existing educational structures, branding itself as “the first alternative university.” Conservative mentors and benefactors sought out promising undergraduates and funded their doctoral credentials through fellowships, thus securing future generations of faculty for the right’s causes. Chodorov’s protégé, William F. Buckley Jr, was ISI’s first president.
Since the 1970s, think tanks promoting cultural conservatism have flourished, partly as a backlash to the liberation movements of the 1960s. Leaders of the postwar conservative movement like Buckley and Frank Meyer worried that the right’s endorsement of free market libertarianism could be taken too far, unwittingly validating some of the more libertine desires of the left. Free markets needed to be anchored to Judeo-Christian norms, they contended. The wave of think tanks founded in the 1970s, such as The Heritage Foundation, heeded this “fusionist” warning to tamp down on libertarianism. Those created in the last half of the 20th century have explicitly been modelled as parallel academic institutions, employing “fellows” with doctoral credentials to conduct research, produce white papers, give talks, and influence policy.
Bridging cultural conservatism with capitalism, the right’s institutions like the American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and the Claremont Institute endorse voucher and charter school models, which divert public education dollars to private for-profit and religious schools. Where the right has not been able to defund public schools, they have taken clever steps to use public funding toward their own ends. Defunding public schools is a major objective of Project 2025.
A New Vehicle
The college institutes born in the 21st century have served all three of these purposes. At once, they exist somewhat independently of the colleges they share an association with, while reaping the benefits of the university’s reputation and accreditation. The advantage of being educational is that they are exempt from taxation while receiving state appropriations, like the Hamilton Center’s receipt of $30 million in tax dollars in its first year. Because of the right’s creative maneuvering, the institutes avoid public accountability, which existing institutions are not exempt from. For example, the University of Florida was not involved in the proposal to create the Hamilton Center attached to its name, but which siphons resources from the university’s existing liberal arts programs.
Are these centers illiberal? As all educational nonprofits must for tax purposes, the institutes announce themselves as apolitical and nonpartisan. But a look behind the curtain—past the drapery of claims to provide intellectual diversity, civic education, and classical liberal arts—reveals a clearer objective than the polite mission statements they espouse. As Bradford Vivian has demonstrated, “intellectual diversity” is not so much a form of actual diversity as a euphemism for enforced partisan parity.
Where the centers are located is another hint as to whom they are for: Harvard, Yale, Penn, and other Ivies, as well as highly regarded state campuses like the University of North Carolina, the University of Florida, the University of Arizona, and the University of Tennessee. These are regional flagship colleges from which American political, economic, cultural, and social leaders hail. As the century-long history of the right’s alternative educational projects shows, the mission is to pluck, prep, and polish the next generation of conservative leaders.
As the century-long history of the right’s alternative educational projects shows, the mission is to pluck, prep, and polish the next generation of conservative leaders.
A closer look at the centers’ events, curricula, and donors similarly betrays their claims to neutrality. Consider, for example, an April 2025 event at the University of Tennessee’s Institute of American Civics, in which panelists debate the 14th Amendment’s ability to confer citizenship to those born in the United States. While legal scholars agree that birthright citizenship is not ambiguous, ending it has been a policy fixation of the current presidential administration. Next month, the University of North Carolina’s James G. Martin Center will feature an anthology of “cancelled” professors who were investigated by their university’s Title IX and other anti-discrimination offices. Rolling back institutional protections for gender, race, and disability, especially on college campuses, is one of the administration’s top goals.
Across all of the institutions, invited speakers, programs, and course offerings focus on the history and philosophy of Europe: the “great books” of Western literature, Classical civilizations of Greece and Rome, and legal and religious history. It’s telling what these subjects leave out—namely, the history, ideas, and literature of nonwhite America, and the rest of the nonwhite world.
American history lessons anchored in the founding, but which leave out the horrors of settler colonialism and Indigenous genocide, are also revealing. The institutes present American history as uniquely of Northern European heritage, as if the United States has only ever had a white past. Descriptors of this type of education as “classical” point to its openness and humanism while ironically focusing only on the works of so-called dead white men. Have no other civilizations prized humanism? It is hard to see how the actual curricula depart from traditions of genteel white supremacy.
Today’s civics institutes meld fiscal liberalism with social conservatism by tying it to Christianity and aristocratic European thought.
Allusion to classical liberal education often echo the scholastic standards of the nation’s Enlightenment-era aristocracy—an education befitting enslavers like Thomas Jefferson whose notions of liberty and liberalism were exclusive to the white male gentry. This is what college humanities looked like before the 1960s campus revolutions, when students fought for a more honest, representative education. Like the think tanks founded in the wake of the 1960s, today’s civics institutes meld fiscal liberalism with social conservatism by tying it to Christianity and aristocratic European thought.
Acknowledging the rightwing ideologues and the foundations who fund and supply the manpower for the institutes gives away their illiberal nature. The typical suspects are always at play, including the Bradley Foundation, Koch Foundation, and Olin Foundation. Others, like the American Council on Trustees and Alumni, who were behind the creation of UNC’s center, work to mold current and incoming college trustees (who are usually lawyers, investors, and business executives) to play activist roles in their state’s higher education system. ACTA trains trustees to push the argument that they should determine curriculum over their state institutions rather than faculty experts. The rightwing National Association of Scholars challenges trustees: “Don’t be empty suits,” urging them to use their authority to abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and take away resources from faculty with suspicious politics.
Business mogul Art Pope funds three centers and think tanks in North Carolina’s research triangle alone: the James G. Martin Center on Academic Renewal, the Civitas Institute, and the John Locke Foundation. Pope was a key donor in the Red Map Project to secure racially gerrymandered voting districts in the state to the benefit of Republican candidates. Pope is now a trustee on the University of North Carolina board of governors.
New Roads in the 21st Century
If conservatives have been waging a century-long battle to control colleges with legacy programs like ISI and think tanks like AEI, why might they require more centers like those that have suddenly emerged in the last decade? The answer is that the right has been emboldened to pursue new infrastructure since 2016. For the first time since their educational quest began at the turn of the 20th century, the far right is finally in control of a political party. Even under the Biden administration, conservative hardliners—and red state legislatures—continued to fund these reactionary institutes as the right wrested control over the Republican Party.
For the first time since their educational quest began at the turn of the 20th century, the far right is finally in control of a political party.
The campus events of the 2010s are also instructive. From 2011 to the COVID-19 closures of 2020, universities (especially elite universities) were constantly a feature of headlines and opinion columns in print media. Cable news also charted the waves of protests for Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Cops Off Campus. Together, legacy print and cable media accelerated a moral panic around campus protests and uncommon pedagogical practices like syllabus trigger warnings that have only exploded since 2023’s student protests against the war on Gaza and what is arguably the newest moral panic: campus antisemitism.
Several factors have led to historic public distrust of higher education in the U.S., and these centers add fuel to the fire. Since the Great Recession of 2008 brought state funding cuts to higher education, tuition and student debt have soared to unsustainable heights. Over 40 million Americans owe a collective $1.78 trillion in education debt. The culmination of skyrocketing tuition, debt, and economic insecurity, combined with sensationalized media coverage on matters ranging from DEI initiatives to critical race theory, to mundane stories about ‘what happens on campus,’ has been the effective demonization of higher education for the masses. This public distrust, or apathy, risks legitimating these civics and leadership centers in their proclaimed purpose to “balance” academia. But their purpose is not to bring balance to higher education, but to tip the scale to the right.
Public distrust, or apathy, risks legitimating these civics and leadership centers in their proclaimed purpose to “balance” academia. But their purpose is not to bring balance to higher education, but to tip the scale to the right.
Many of the people involved in these institutions are acting in good faith. For most of my life, I was right there with them, buying into the need for the conservative intellectual tradition to have a place in higher education. But, as I discovered in the course of my research on conservatism in the academy, I was too credulous. Americans should beware. These institutes gain their legitimacy with buy-in from centrist liberals who aren’t attuned to the dog whistles of classical education and its preoccupation with Western Civilization. The institutes’ validity relies on the assumption that the existing campus is too far to the left when, in fact, the academy’s structure and governance make it a deeply hierarchical, conservative institution. The assertion that the campus is some bastion of Marxism helps the right strategically inch its ideas closer to the mainstream and its age-old objectives—a return to greater racial, gender, and economic inequality—closer to reality. The new college centers are just the right’s latest vehicle in a longer struggle to control higher education.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is a historian of US colleges and universities. She is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and host of the weekly American Campus Podcast.
