2/4/23, 11:54 AM Conservative Philanthropy’s War Against Race and Gender Studies in U.S.

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INEQUALITY

Conservative Philanthropy’s War Against Race

and Gender Studies in U.S. Higher Education
Posted on June 29, 2020 by HISTPHIL 4 Comments
Editors’ Note: Introducing her 2013 article, “Movement Conservatism and the Attack on Ethnic Studies
(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13613324.2013.792794),” published in Race, Ethnicity and
Education, Donna J. Nicol argues that conservative philanthropy during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and
1990s targeted ethnic and gender studies because these disciplines called into question who had the right to
determine what constitutes U.S. values and specifically provided a critique of traditional politics, culture, and
social affairs.

In White Money/Black Power (http://www.beacon.org/White-MoneyBlack-Power-P621.aspx)(2006),

Africana Studies scholar Noliwe Rooks notes that the Ford Foundation’s president McGeorge Bundy
agreed to finance minority and women’s fellowships to help curtail Black student activism in the
1960’s. This request for financial support came from U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s
administration, Rooks says. The Ford Foundation encouraged campus leaders to give into Black
student demands for the creation of a Black Studies program to keep these students so pre-occupied
with academics that they would not be lured into more radical politics like that of the Black Panther
Party or Students for a Democratic Society. The Ford Foundation dominated charitable giving of
higher education programs for nearly four decades before a new form of conservative investment
began again in earnest in the 1970’s with the creation of the Heritage Foundation.

Complementing Rooks’ examination of the role of philanthropic organizations in shaping higher

education during the second half of the 20th century, though taking a particular focus on the role of
conservative philanthropies and conservative think tanks such as Heritage, my 2013 article,
“Movement Conservatism and the Attack on Ethnic Studies
(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13613324.2013.792794),” describes a modern
articulation of conservative philanthropy known as “movement conservatism.”

By conservative philanthropy, I mean philanthropic support by business and political leaders or

organizations holding in common one or more of these values: (1) a belief in laissez-faire capitalism, (2)
a belief in traditionalism, which is an ideology that advocates for maintenance of the social order
through religion and patriotism that often translates into a belief in the submission of women and
separation and subordination of the races and (3) a strong support for anti-communism, even going as
far as supporting “pre-emptive war” as a means of curtailing the spread of communism.

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Movement conservatism seeks to preserve the economic social order by funneling millions of dollars
into U.S. colleges and universities to respond to critics of the free enterprise system. With the aid of
financial support from various conservative foundations, think tanks, and public policy institutes in
the U.S., movement conservatism ushered in a new era of conservative social action in the second half
of the twentieth century.

Fueled by receipt of a confidential memo written by Lewis F. Powell in 1971, who was then Nixon’s
nominee to the Supreme Court, claiming that there was a broad attack on the free market system,
business executives such as Adolph Coors felt encouraged to use charitable giving to take action
against the attack which Powell says was happening in four key areas of U.S. society: higher
education, the media, politics, and the courts. Coors, for example, provided $250,000 in seed money
for the creation of the Heritage Foundation which became the main conservative think tank and
funding intermediary to date.

In this memo, Powell charged that social sciences faculty, in particular, were highly critical of the
capitalist system and he called upon U.S. Chamber of Commerce members to assist in establishing a
staff of pro-enterprise system scholars and speakers to: (1) evaluate social science textbooks; (2)
demand balance in the hiring of new faculty; (3) build relationships with graduate schools of business
through offering internships and career placement; and (4) insist upon equal time on the college
speaking circuit to challenge the attack on the enterprise system.  William E. Simon, former Treasury
Secretary under Nixon and Ford echoed Powell’s calls for greater involvement of U.S. business
leaders in financing and shaping higher education when he encouraged, “Funds generated by
business…must rush by the multimillions to the aid of liberty…to funnel desperately needed funds to
scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists who understand the relationship between political
and economic liberty.” (Simon, 1979, p. 230). Simon was very active during this period of movement
conservatism, having served as president for the John Olin Foundation, co-founder of the Madison
Center for Educational Affairs and serving on the boards of the Heritage and John Templeton
Foundations and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Similar to Powell’s critique of social science faculty, William Bennett, who served as the chairman of
the National Endowment for the Humanities and later as Secretary of Education under Ronald
Reagan, published a report in 1984, entitled To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher
Education, where he claimed that, ‘The humanities, and particularly the study of Western civilization,
have lost their central place in the undergraduate curriculum’ (Bennett 1984, 1). Bennett charged that
sixties radicals were threatening a precious U.S. heritage in the name of a more inclusive curriculum
as these ‘radicals’ were now deeply entrenched in the nation’s colleges and universities as humanities
faculty. This report, along with Bennett’s critique of Stanford University’s decision to add more works
from women and people of color into a Western Civilization course required for all freshmen
students, launched the Academic Culture Wars in 1985.

For nearly a decade after Powell’s call was made, dozens of conservative philanthropic organizations
such as the Coors, Scaife, Olin and Bradley Foundation have committed philanthropic support to
conservative educational initiatives such as high stakes testing, charter schools, the repeal of
affirmative action laws, and the elimination of ethnic and gender studies programs through the U.S.
Academic Culture Wars of the 1980’s and 1990’s.

During the Culture Wars, I contend that movement conservatives targeted ethnic and gender studies
because these disciplines called into question who had the right to determine what constitutes U.S.
values and specifically provided a critique of traditional politics, culture and social affairs. Reiterating
Powell’s claim that the free enterprise system was under attack, think tanks such as the Heritage
Foundation and academic reform organizations such as the National Association of Scholars feared

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fields that were established during the Student Movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s such as Black
studies and women’s studies relied on cultural relativism in their critique of capitalism and the
existing social order.

At the height of the Culture Wars, conservative academic associations targeted ethnic and women’s
studies. Utilizing the more than $20 million dollars in annual support from philanthropic
organizations, the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the Madison Center for Educational
Affairs (MCEA), the Collegiate Network, and the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA) took aim at
scholars and scholarship based in ethnic and women’s studies. David Callahan says in “Liberal
Policy’s Weak Foundation” that, “By strategically leveraging their resources, conservative
foundations have engineered the rise of a right wing intelligentsia that has come to wield enormous
influence in national policy debates.” Organizations such as NAS with an operating budget of over
$1.05 million dollars in 1994 focused criticisms of ethnic studies and women’s studies through their
quarterly journal, Academic Questions. For example, NAS member Thomas Short claimed that “Black
studies seemed a small exception to the principle that the curriculum should not be determined by
political objectives; but before we knew it, feminism was also establishing its claim to be part of the
curriculum, and then to all of it.” (Short, 1988, 8). Short went a step further to suggest that ‘inferior
works’ by minority and women authors were replacing the ‘great books,’ by noting: “There is a
familiar charge that the traditional curriculum unjustly neglects the contributions of women, black
Americans and other ethnic groups. This charge is much weakened by the current celebration of
inferior works chosen simply on the basis of the race and sex of the authors.” (Short 1988, 10).

According to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), the conservative monies
given to higher education in the late 1980s and early 1990s were targeted and multi-dimensional. The
NCRP reported that from 1992-1994, twelve of these conservative philanthropic foundations provided
over $88.9 million dollars in grant monies to individual scholars, research institutes, academic study
programs and public policy centers with the aim to support and extend the theoretical and
philosophical basis for free market economics and limited government.

A secondary goal of this conservative investment was to establish a network of faculty, students,
alumni and trustees who would oppose progressive curricula such as women’s and ethnic studies. To
achieve this particular goal, members of this network of academic conservatives launched an attack
on ‘liberal’ higher education commonly known as the academic Culture Wars, claiming liberalism
eroded academic standards and denied conservative faculty and students their right to academic
freedom. Movement conservatives believed that U.S. higher education faced the erosion of standards
and the silencing of dissent by liberal faculty and administrators, which necessitated changes in U.S.
higher education policy regarding admissions, curricular decisions and faculty hiring by these
conservative donors.

In a 1994 report on the political correctness (or PC) debates which were at the center of the Culture
Wars, the National Council for Research on Women found that media coverage of these debates
(which were largely funded by conservative foundations, think tanks and academic reform
organizations) exploded from 101 articles in newspapers and journals in 1988 to over 3,989 articles in
1991. The PC conspiracy provided an irresistible opportunity for the print media to attract more
readers with sensationalized headlines, graphics, and stories that play on the deepest fears of white,
middle-class Americans. Books and editorials about the “malaise of American liberal arts education”
by conservative scholars such as Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball were
funded by conservative foundations such as the John Olin and Lynde and Harry Bradley
foundations, which were providing the intellectual basis for the Culture Wars.

From 1988 through 2005, for example, the NAS received over $10 million dollars in grants from
different conservative philanthropies, most notably the Olin, Bradley, Scaife, Coors and Smith
Richardson foundations to support a wide range of programs (Foundation Center 1984–2005). The
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NAS, in turn, used these grants to fund conservative student newspapers such as the Dartmouth
Review, internships to train conservative student activists, established endowed fellowships for
conservative scholars, and financed conservative educational policy institutes such as the Madison
Center for Educational Achievement (MCEA). The National Center for Public Policy Research, using
donations and grants from various conservative foundations and corporations including the
Carthage, Castlerock, Scaife and Earhart foundations and ExxonMobil, created an African American
conservative speakers’ bureau called Project 21 in 1992. Several members of Project 21, including
economist Thomas Sowell, author Shelby Steele and conservative businessman and University of
California regent Ward Connerly, were particularly outspoken against ethnic and gender studies and
affirmative action during the Culture Wars with Steele going on the record to claim that ethnic studies
was a sundry manifestation of the liberal welfare state (Steele, 1992, 2).

Education policy scholar Joel Spring refers to the establishment of webs of interlocking conservative
foundations and think tanks and the subsequent dissemination of the research supported by these
organizations as ‘the trickle-down theory of ideas’ (Spring 2002). This theory holds that in trying to
save the country from liberal scholars who have been the intellectual architects of a ‘suicidal’ course
of an expanding welfare state, conservatives needed to identify and train a group of intellectuals that
would promote a general understanding of the importance of the free market (Spring 2002). Thus,
projects funded by conservative foundations such as conservative speakers’ bureaus and internships
to train conservative activists worked as a counter-argument against critics of the free enterprise
system. In the case of ethnic and gender studies, these initiatives affected the very survival of these
disciplines in the academy by using race and gender based rhetoric to an unsuspecting public, who
most likely viewed the Culture Wars as a simple ideological debate rather than a calculated,
concerted effort on the part of movement conservatives to dismantle and rid the academy of
academic fields that critiqued the existing social order.

As a result of this heightened public attention to issues involving hate speech on campus, sexual
harassment cases, curricular reform and race and gender debates in the classroom, ethnic and gender
studies programs experienced public and institutional backlash ranging from letter writing
campaigns against proposed invited speakers to the loss of institutional support for new faculty hires.
During this period, several feminist scholars had their cars vandalized and received hate mail as was
the case with feminist religious studies scholar Jane Schaberg at the University of Detroit-Mercy in
1993. Conservative lawmakers and university trustees asked the University of California at Santa
Cruz to revoke a $75,000 award to activist-scholar Angela Davis after it was decided that the fall-out
from Davis’ past was too much to bear. California state senator Bill Leonard even likened Davis to a
“leftist equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan.” Ethnic studies faculty experienced similar backlash as
gender studies faculty and often had to deal with students’ accusation of “reverse racism” through
teaching evaluations and student complaints. Ward Connerly even called for an end to cultural
graduation celebrations because they “promoted the balkanization of the nation” following his
successful campaign to pass Proposition 209 in California, which ended race and gender based
preferences in state hiring, contracting and state university admissions in 1996.  To fund this anti-
affirmative action consulting work, Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute received more than
that $2.1 million in contributions from the Bradley, Olin and Scaife foundations.

In blunting the effects of the Culture Wars backlash, ethnic and gender studies programs at research
institutions such as the University of Wisconsin were able to fare better than their comprehensive
university counterparts such as California State Universities. For example, at the University of
Wisconsin, the local chapter of the National Association of Scholars made occasional calls to
university administrators calling for the dismantling of the African American Studies program but
the success of this program in securing research grants and having the support of powerful
administrators such as University of Wisconsin Chancellor Donna Shalala shielded the program from
too much intrusion from external forces. On the other hand, at comprehensive universities such as the
California State Universities, ethnic and women’s studies programs had to work to get diversity
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requirements on the state ballot as a way to meet enrollment standards particularly after the Culture
Wars backlash led to a decrease in student enrollment at places such as California State University
Northridge. In some comprehensive universities, ethnic and gender studies programs were
prohibited from hiring additional faculty until the controversy of the Culture Wars died down or the
academic rigor and viability of these fields could be proven. At California State University Fullerton,
a former provost proposed collapsing ethnic studies and women’s studies together under one
department as a punitive measure for declining student enrollments during this period.  We see that
institutional type played a significant role in how ethnic and gender studies programs were able to
manage to stay afloat during this very contentious period.

Generally, the ability to resist encroachment by outside groups was directly tied to an institution’s
research endowment, donor base, and powerful administrators and trustees, making comprehensive
state universities particularly vulnerable to these external forces. Ethnic and gender studies programs
were more likely to experience budgetary and personnel cuts at comprehensive universities because
there is a commonly held belief that these programs are not useful to students since many of these
universities were established through statutory provisions to prepare the next generation of teachers.
Movement conservatives believe that discussions of what they deem ‘identity politics’ has no place in
the K-12 classroom and therefore have no place in the university. Even if these conservative
foundations and the groups they financed were unable to totally get rid of ethnic and gender studies
programs, they were able to cast enough doubt about the utility of multicultural education in U.S.
colleges and universities.

Today, as universities move rapidly toward even greater corporatization, it is important to look at the
historical precedents which gave us this trend.  The corporate university has been over a century in
the making with women and people of color feeling the effects most acutely as they pursued an
education as a means of invoking their rights as citizens and as they sought inclusion in the
university curriculum. I am not sure what the remedy to all of this should be, but failure to
understand how conservative philanthropy worked to limit and control educational access for
women and people of color has made it possible for the corporatization of the university to flourish.
We can ill-afford to assume that movement conservatives are simply ignorant racists and sexists who
are unable to galvanize a movement. As conservative political philosopher Robert Weaver once wrote
in 1948, “Ideas Have Consequences.” And movement conservatives—from Lynde and Harry Bradley
to the Koch brothers—were encouraged by Lewis F. Powell and other influential conservative
thinkers to embrace the strategy that to legitimize your ideas, you fund it with your own cash.

-Donna J. Nicol

Donna J. Nicol is an Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at California State University
Dominguez Hills.  Her research focuses on African American educational history and the politics of ethnic and
gender studies curriculum. She is currently working on a book-length project which examines an understudied
but important area in the history of U.S. higher education – the role that race and gender play in the exercise of
university trustee power. You can follow her work at https://csudh.academia.edu/DonnaNicol
(https://csudh.academia.edu/DonnaNicol)

Sources:

Bennett, William, J. 1984. To Reclaim A Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education
(https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED247880). Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities.

Bennett, William J. 1992. The Devaluing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children
(https://www.worldcat.org/title/devaluing-of-america-the-fight-for-our-culture-and-our-
children/oclc/748470356). New York: Simon and Schuster.

Callahan, David. 1995. “Liberal Policy’s Weak Foundation.” The Nation.

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Clark, Veve, Shirley N. Garner, Margaret Higonnet, and Ketu Katrak. 1996. Antifeminism in the
Academy (https://www.worldcat.org/title/anti-feminism-in-the-
academy/oclc/869641661&referer=brief_results). Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge.

Kristol, Irving. 1991. “The Tragedy of Multiculturalism.” Wall Street Journal: A10.

Nicol, Donna, J. (2013): Movement conservatism and the attack on ethnic studies, Race Ethnicity and
Education (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13613324.2013.792794),
DOI:10.1080/13613324.2013.792794

National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. 1997. Moving a National Policy Agenda: The
Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations (https://www.ncrp.org/publication/moving-
public-policy-agenda). Washington, DC: National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

Powell, Lewis F. 1971. Powell Memorandum: The Attack on the Free Enterprise System
(https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/). Book 1: Powell Papers. Lexington, VA:
Washington and Lee University School of Law.

Rooks, Noliwe. 2007. White Money/Black Power: African American Studies and the Crises of Race in
Higher Education (http://www.beacon.org/White-MoneyBlack-Power-P621.aspx). Beacon Press.

Schultz, Debra L. 1993. To Reclaim a Legacy of Diversity: Analyzing the “Political Correctness”
Debates in Higher Education (https://www.worldcat.org/title/to-reclaim-a-legacy-of-diversity-
analyzing-the-political-correctness-debates-in-higher-education/oclc/29267777). New York: National
Council for Research on Women.

Short, Thomas. 1988. “Diversity and Breaking the disciplines: Two new assaults on the curriculum.”
(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02682738) Academic Questions 1 (3): 6–29.

Simon, William. 1979. A Time for Truth (https://www.worldcat.org/title/time-for-truth-with-an-

epilogue-by-the-author/oclc/15208952?referer=di&ht=edition). New York: Berkley Publishing
Company.

Spring, Joel. 2002. Political Agendas for Education: From the Religious Right to the Green Party
(https://www.worldcat.org/title/political-agendas-for-education-from-the-religious-right-to-the-
green-party/oclc/47838454?referer=di&ht=edition). Mahwah, NJ: L. Erbaum Associates.

Steele, Shelby. 1992. “The New Segregation.” Imprimus, August, 21, 1–4.

Weaver, Richard M. 1948/1984. Ideas Have Consequences

(https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo17116688.html). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Tags: Donna J. Nicol. Bookmark the permalink.

4 thoughts on “Conservative Philanthropy’s War Against

Race and Gender Studies in U.S. Higher Education”

MARTIN MORSE WOOSTER says:

June 30, 2020 at 5:26 pm

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Professor Nicol and other historians of philanthropy would do a better job of critiquing
conservative foundations and the program officers who work for them if they would abandon
martial metaphors in describing what these foundations do. The program officers are not generals,
they do not wage war, and they do not have battles. They do what their liberal counterparts do:
they support scholars and nonprofits. Using martial metaphors distorts what conservative
foundations do and weakens criticisms of them.

Lynde Bradley died in 1942 and Harry Bradley died in 1965. How could they be influenced by a
report Lewis Powell wrote in 1971?

Reply
DJNICOL says:
July 1, 2020 at 12:48 am
Thank you Martin for you comment. However, I must point out that my use of the term “war”
comes directly from that which these conservative foundations funded – The Academic
Culture Wars. But more importantly, many conservative politicians and pundits used the
language of “war” to describe this ideological battle in US higher education, religion, politics
and so forth. Pat Buchanan often said that conservatives were in a “Culture War for the Soul of
America” and Newt Gingrich used and continues to use such metaphors to this day. Likewise,
Lewis F. Powell utilized similar “marital metaphors” in his memo including words like attack,
assault, extremists, etc. Conservatives used the language of war to express the urgency by
which they needed to act so my use of the term “war” comes from their own popular lexicon.

Program officers at conservative foundations have political agendas just as ones at liberal
foundations do. Likewise, they are guided by boards of directors who tell them which projects
to target often to align their political beliefs. So yes, Harry Bradley died in 1965 but the Bradley
Foundation was committed to conservative principles and funding very specific educational
policies influenced by the recommendations of Powell, Simon, Bennett and others. For
example, Bradley Foundation funded several a school choice/voucher projects in Wisconsin
around the same time that William Bennett was promoting school choice as the Reagan
administration’s Mandate for Change Education Policy Proposal. Bennett also received $75,000
through his Empower America think tank which promoted school choice. So yes, program
officers can wage “ideological wars.” Finally, I never suggested that liberal foundations were
without political motivations for the projects they fund. In fact, my opening paragraph
describes how the “liberal” Ford Foundation’s funding of Black and women’s studies was not
to advance this field or for altruism; they literally fund Black and women’s studies programs
as a political favor to the Johnson administration to quell social unrest in the streets.

The main point I’m hoping readers get from my article is that race and gender studies
programs experienced a great deal of negative public opinion and material consequences as a
result of these concerted, strategic organizing efforts or ideological “wars” that were made real
through the use of conservative philanthropy.

–Donna J. Nicol

Reply
BENJAMIN DAVID STEELE says:
March 31, 2021 at 11:12 am
If you read the literature, messages, and mission statements from right-wing organizations and
their leaders, they are obsessed with the ‘war’ metaphor for absolutely everything. There was
Nixon’s war on drugs and Bush’s war on terror. How does one fight a war against an

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