"laundering lying extremist bullshit in institutional reputation"

December 16, 2024 11:54 AM

The Invisible Hand: How Dark Money Is Inventing Prestige for Right-Wing Academics

The [American Academy of Sciences and Letters] website features an impressive picture of the Library of Congress, a Board of Trustees hailing from elite academic institutions, and almost nothing about the organization or its origins. That’s because, despite its name suggesting a long, storied history—echoing esteemed institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences,the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters—the AASL did not exist until 2022.

From Inside Higher Education: Has Chapel Hill’s ‘Civic Life’ School Become a Conservative Center? (archive.is link without registration wall):

On Fox News, then–board chair David Boliek said Chapel Hill has “no shortage of left-of-center, progressive views on our campus, like many campuses across the nation. But the same really can’t be said about right-of-center views. So this is an effort to try to remedy that.” Prior chairs of the Chapel Hill faculty denounced the creation of the school, and hundreds of faculty signed a letter saying it would violate the academic tradition that the faculty controls the curriculum. But the GOP-controlled State Legislature pitched in millions in funding and passed legislation requiring Chapel Hill to create the school and hire 10 to 20 faculty from outside the university, plus make them eligible for tenure.

IHE, in July: The Curious Rise of a Conservative—or Civic-Minded?—Center at the University of Florida (archive.is)

In the summer of 2022, Florida newspapers reported on the strange appearance of $3 million in one-time funds from Florida’s GOP-controlled state Legislature for something called the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civics Education at the University of Florida. The university said it hadn’t asked for this new entity.

From UNC's student newspaper, The Daily Tarheel: In August, 11 new faculty members were hired to teach within the School of Civic Life and Leadership. Many of the new faculty share backgrounds in a network of think tanks, nonprofit donors and similarly funded academic centers.

Jay Smith, a UNC history professor, said the hires seem to be hand selected from a "very restrictive pool."

"One's presence in that pool has little to do with academic merit, per se," Smith said. "The hiring itself is meant to serve ideological, rather than intellectual purposes."

From the American Association of University Professors: The Right-Wing Attacks on Higher Education: An Analysis of the State Legislative Landscape

posted by Why Is The World In Love Again? (29 comments total)

Thanks for this post.

The first link about the American Academy of Sciences and Letters reminds me of the American College of Pediatricians, who I found out about in my previous job because patients kept quoting their confused information about getting the HPV vaccine (they were in favor and then they were against it and now they are in favour of it again but maintain weird "somebody somewhere had an adverse health reaction years after getting the vaccine, might be related, might not, who can tell" scare-mondering articles), and my boss-doctors had to keep explaining that the ACP is not the AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) which would be the body you'd go to for guidance.

One of the ways you can identify these conservative advocacy groups masquerading as professional associations is that they don't offer AMA-accredited CME (continuing medical education).
posted by joannemerriam at 12:21 PM on December 16 [19 favorites]

Why does this movement tend to take place outside of Christian schools that share their ideological bent?
posted by Selena777 at 12:41 PM on December 16 [3 favorites]

Because that's the whole point? The strategy is funding programs they invented at actual state universities and ivy leagues and then giving themselves awards they also invented and funded in order to grant themselves and their shitty ideas a veneer of academic and ultimately mainstream legitimacy. The whole strategy doesn't work if it's just Bob Jones University giving Bravery awards to their own conservative professors for saying Woke Bad/Classical Liberalism Good. No one would care.
posted by windbox at 12:58 PM on December 16 [27 favorites]

The names always have this weird cryptic whiff, where something feels just so slightly off. Whether it's the Heritage Foundation or the American Academy of ArtsSciences and Letters, or even Moms for Liberty, there's something about how they name these things. I'm not going to say I can pick them out 100% of the time but I bet I'd bat above the Mendoza Line.
posted by axiom at 1:11 PM on December 16 [9 favorites]

The Vicky Mendoza Line?
posted by joannemerriam at 1:13 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]

Not exactly wrong hot take: dudes really like The Wolf of Wall Street movie, and it outlines the thought process for scamming so idiots don't even learn about that anymore. They just need a bunch of money.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:27 PM on December 16

windbox covers a lot of the practical advantages of the strategy. I will say that it’s not that conservatives aren’t funding these kinds of initiatives at religious schools; one piece I read and ultimately decided not to include in the fpp is from The Intercept (recommend 12ft.io for dodging the registration wall, archive.is doesn’t work well), which details, among other things, the creation of an endowed professorship called the “Knights of Columbus Professor of Law and the Catholic Tradition”. I wound up not including the piece because while it has a very interesting look at how the money for these projects is directed and structured, endowed professorships are a relatively old and straightforward way of encouraging ideological footholds, and an endowment name like that suggests subtlety isn’t a major priority of that particular network, and I wanted to focus on the newer, more insidious strategy suggested in the other articles.

But in addition to the practical benefits of targeting secular schools, there’s a psychological element, and that’s if you read the words of people involved in this movement, they are all of them red, mad, and nude about “Woke DEI”, and see this as their answer to it.
posted by Why Is The World In Love Again? at 1:29 PM on December 16 [9 favorites]

There's a whole ecosystem of these nonprofits in NoVa. It's so pervasive you'll sometime see an org like "The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute" come up and discover it's one guy who set it up so he can write a commissioned hit piece on Linus Torvalds.
posted by ocschwar at 1:29 PM on December 16 [17 favorites]

Isn't there a way to invoke fraud and misrepresentation in a case like this (I mean, I know the point is about other issues, but the naming thing sure seems ripe for an IP attack on Trademark confusion?)

Like, If I made a company named Appple computers. I can't do that, why do these fucks get to do something like this confusing two different orgs for something completely different?

Fuck em, use the law against these pricks.
posted by symbioid at 1:58 PM on December 16 [3 favorites]

See also: ACLJ, aka: "American Center for Law and Justice" (aka: Jay Sekulow's foundation, a member of Trump's legal team, and who, as a kid starting a bible club, got materials from them about how to do so, because yeah...)
posted by symbioid at 2:00 PM on December 16 [7 favorites]

A quiz, for people who might want to test their ability. Which of these are far-right organizations?

Alliance Defending Freedom
Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine
American Center for Law and Justice
American Family Association
Center for Equal Opportunity
Foundation for American Innovation
Institute for the American Worker
Media Research Center
Public Interest Legal Foundation
Susan B. Anthony List
posted by box at 2:07 PM on December 16 [10 favorites]

Of course, judging by the results at New College, where incoming SAT scores have dropped by 100 points, nearly 20% of the student body chose not to return, professor are resigning in unheard-of numbers (40%), and their academic rating plummeted, things might not turn out well for those conservative academies.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:19 PM on December 16 [5 favorites]

Are these the people they're trying to push out, or are even the baseball guys and new professors leaving?
posted by Selena777 at 2:35 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]

Robert J Zimmer, who passed away last year, resigned from the advisory board of the "University" of Austin, another deceptive rightwing project, because he didn't agree with the criticisms they were making of US higher education.

I wonder if his estate knows they are using his name to give cranks "free speech" awards?
posted by Vegiemon at 3:05 PM on December 16 [3 favorites]

things might not turn out well for those conservative academies

it's a bit win-win for them. if it works, great, an indoctrination center. if it doesn't, oh well, they destroyed a progressive institution at least.
posted by kokaku at 4:23 PM on December 16 [8 favorites]

it's a bit win-win for them. if it works, great, an indoctrination center. if it doesn't, oh well, they destroyed a progressive institution at least.

And they're being silenced by the so-called tolerant left.
posted by BrashTech at 4:26 PM on December 16 [4 favorites]

Why does this movement tend to take place outside of Christian schools that share their ideological bent?

My sense from what I recall from going to Uni over 10 years ago now is that it is a Power Play. I can't quote anybody, but just from walking around - and especially during the University's student organization days/etc. days - the sense of 'no escape' was there for me. Just an endless sea of religious university groups, adverts for them, etc.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 4:34 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]

Of course, judging by the results at New College, where incoming SAT scores have dropped by 100 points, nearly 20% of the student body chose not to return, professor are resigning in unheard-of numbers (40%), and their academic rating plummeted, things might not turn out well for those conservative academies.

The conservative academies will be just fine for quite some time, churning out hot ideological garbage as scholarship. The whole point, as with the disinformation FPP from this morning/last night, is to create an environment where accuracy per se doesn't matter. All knowledge may have always been somewhat ideological (guessing that Fanon or Lacan or somebody would back me up on that, but I am not super well read so I can't quote chapter and verse), but the project here is to make it explicitly ideological and to capture the orthodoxy. They do not care about SAT scores. They care about ideological propagation and dominance.

At a fundamental level, the Conservative project in this country has been playing to win for a long time in a way that the Liberal establishment is frankly incapable of understanding, much less fighting back against.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:54 PM on December 16 [7 favorites]

There's a whole ecosystem of these nonprofits in NoVa.

or, Alexandria, DC, Secession 1847
posted by eustatic at 5:05 PM on December 16

They do not care about SAT scores. They care about ideological propagation and dominance.

Given that a major motivating factor is envy of the liberal foothold in “elite academia” they are going to have to care about SAT scores a little. If you can’t get any kids to choose Florida Upstairs Freedom Institute over Harvard I think it’s pretty hard to manufacture that kind of institutional credibility from whole cloth.
posted by atoxyl at 7:52 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]

Hence the strategy of trying to set up enclaves at places like UNC or UFL I guess.
posted by atoxyl at 7:58 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]

An end to end way to create obedient consumers of the entire Conservative Culture machine. So much of modern Conservatism has learned from the rise of the insular evangelical culture that if you ensure that you keep people driving in the circle of your cul de sac it's a big money maker. It gets easier if you keep people locked in by demonizing mainstream culture. Expanding beyond the megachurches hawing whatever the 2024 version of DC Talk is, this is getting people who are ingesting manospehere shills as teenagers to get into a college that won't challenge any of the notions they've ever been fed.
posted by finalbroadcast at 10:00 PM on December 16 [2 favorites]

they are going to have to care about SAT scores a little

Yeah, for people who are more interested in ideology than quality, there are already places like Liberty University.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:18 AM on December 17 [1 favorite]

"What the program really does is create safe spaces for students to discuss the conservative position on major issues."

That's at best badly phrased and at worst a self-own. I hope that all spaces on campus are safe for students to discuss conservative positions - and socialist positions, libertarian positions, Marxist positions, fascist positions, religious fundamentalist positions, and so on.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 9:40 AM on December 17 [1 favorite]

The sentence immediately preceding that:

FEHE sponsors programs like the Civil Discourse Project at Duke University, which purports to be aimed at creating intellectually diverse communities through “freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression for faculty and students alike.”

…makes it fairly clear that the objection being raised is that it is safe exclusively for conservative views. 2/10 bait.

Nevertheless, I think you have many fine job prospects among the programs outlined in this thread, let me know if you want me to be a reference in your hiring or tenure packet.
posted by Why Is The World In Love Again? at 10:45 AM on December 17 [1 favorite]

Yeah, for people who are more interested in ideology than quality, there are already places like Liberty University.

This thread has me thinking, what are the existing halfway respectable conservative enclaves in academia? I’ve got GMU and Claremont McKenna. Hillsdale seems more serious than Liberty University but is too overt about its intentions to be taken seriously outside of conservative spheres.
posted by atoxyl at 11:54 AM on December 17 [1 favorite]

Yeah you could say Stanford or something but it still feels like a slightly different thing to me. But then again they have the Hoover Institution.
posted by atoxyl at 11:56 AM on December 17

From 2016, Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology points to Pepperdine.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:22 PM on December 17 [2 favorites]

An end to end way to create obedient consumers of the entire Conservative Culture machine. So much of modern Conservatism has learned from the rise of the insular evangelical culture that if you ensure that you keep people driving in the circle of your cul de sac it's a big money maker.

This is what "the deep state" actually is. Conservatism is targeting people from cradle-to-grave in a way that is so calculated and well-funded, the counterparts just don't exist.

At a fundamental level, the Conservative project in this country has been playing to win for a long time in a way that the Liberal establishment is frankly incapable of understanding, much less fighting back against.

I agree and it made me wonder, is this degree of hunger for power and greed simply a conservative trait? I simply don't have this hunger for power and dominance, and people who have it are so fundamentally different, it almost makes me wonder if this is an innate trait.

To actually infiltrate schools and create inatitutions to legitimize onesef is next-level!
posted by ichomp at 5:37 PM on December 17