Episode 74: The Trustees (with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd)

A group of wealthy men and women walk into a talent scout's office.

We have an acuite I'd like to sign.

Cool, the talent scout replies.

What do you do?

One guy starts throwing dollar bills at two other guys who begin building an immense climbing wall, while another provides athletes with get-out-of-jail free cards.

Another starts a right-wing think tank that tells people how to use cooking oil to ward off infectious disease.

Another gets really into allegations of plagiarism until his wife is accused of plagiarism.

The talent scout goes, Okay, okay, I get it.

The joke's going on too long already.

What do you call this fucking thing?

And they go, the Board of Trustees.

Anyway, that's my aristocrat's version with this.

Hi, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moir Donnegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

Now, Adrian, we have had a lot of occasion as Americans, as people who work for a university, to think about all of the strange discourses surrounding American colleges and universities, particularly the fancy private ones, and how there's a lot of interesting imaginaries like sort of projected onto these, right?

But today, we have an opportunity to talk about the people who are actually controlling these institutions, the shadowy, ill-understood, tremendously wealthy individuals who make up the boards of trustees.

That's right.

When we hear about the university and media and political discourse, and we talked to Samuel Catlin about this most recently, we normally hear about students.

They occupy a lot of real estate in the minds of our pundit class.

We talk about faculty and we sometimes hear about administrators.

It's their foibles and their peculiar rituals, right, like safe spaces, trigger warnings or whatever, that we all hear about.

And, you know, it's their viewpoint diversity that we worry about.

But in this episode of Embed with the Right, we're going to talk about a group that this leaves out, which is actually central to the functioning of American universities and has influenced how they they function pretty much since the beginning.

I almost called this, oh, this is the story of a hidden group in American colleges, but they're not super hidden in the sense that their name's on the fucking buildings, right?

They're in the name of Vanderbilt University, Carnegie Mellon, Rice, Clark, or

Stanford.

Or if you think about HBCUs, our guest today alerted me to the fact why Spelman College has the name that it does, which is that it was this tiny school and was then endowed by John D.

Rockefeller and is named Spellman after Rockefeller's wife as kind of a gift to Laura Spellman.

But I'm glad you mention our guests today, Adrienne, because we should introduce her.

We are very lucky to be joined by Lauren Shepard.

Lauren, thank you so much for being here with us.

Yeah, thank you.

Great to be here.

So Lauren is a historian of American higher education and in fact runs an amazing podcast, American Campus, that is just billed as that.

It's a history of higher education in the United States and it is is that.

It's absolutely brilliant.

It tackles questions ranging from pushbacks on affirmative action via the movement to create free college and what happened to it, all the way to questions like, why do U.S.

universities have dorms?

She's also the author of Resistance from the Right, Conservatives and the Campus Wars, which came out two years ago from the University of North Carolina Press, which is absolutely excellent.

And she is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume, Decolonizing the Campus, which she put out with John R.

Legge.

Welcome, Lauren.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I appreciate the introduction.

So, why are we talking about these people?

Maybe one little anecdote to get people started.

During the recent attacks on Columbia University, there were a lot of people asking me, like, hey, how come the university caved so hard to the Trump administration's demands?

And I kept having to explain to them that, like, this was not the Trump administration negotiating really with a bunch of faculty or a bunch of administrators at Columbia.

It was the Trump administration really negotiating with the Board of Trustees, which, spoiler alert, is a little bit more aligned with the Trump administration than, you know, if you had asked the English department at Columbia University, let's say.

You could even tell in the coverage, which was very much driven by the Wall Street Journal, the fact that a lot of financial journalists appear to be very well informed what quote-unquote Columbia was thinking about the negotiations with the Trump administration.

Well, that's because they didn't hear it from whoever the interim president of Colombia was that day, who changed like every three minutes anyway.

It was because

they had the cell number for the Board of Trustee members who really were making the decision.

Well, cell number, or maybe they were in a signal group chat.

But yeah, I mean.

So, Lauren, is it accurate to say that campus stories often don't focus on the trustees because sort of their demographics and politics, by and large, don't lend themselves to the kind of left-wing censorship framing that campus critics tend to like.

Yeah, the campus critics who like to rail against left-wing censorship are almost always talking about students, those censorious and powerful 18 to 24-year-olds.

But yes, I'm sure a trustee has probably never been accused of being, say, like a Marxist, just because it's the opposite worldview required for a trustee's job.

So the job of the trustee is to be a fundraiser and a fund manager of the institution.

And this differs somewhat between private and public schools.

So I'll concentrate on private colleges because those are the ones that always make a splash in the New York Times and the Atlantic op-ed pages by some of this show's favorite cultural critics.

But yeah, the trustees are the ultimate authority over the university.

So anytime you see a headline that's questioning, you know, the motives or the activities of college students, that's something I would recommend readers sort of like second guess, right?

So the trustees tend to focus on their fiduciary responsibilities, but they technically have the final say over every matter of the institution, right?

So strictly speaking, trustees have the final say over everything from awarding degrees to hiring groundskeepers to approving book manuscripts acquired by the university press, though they will delegate those tasks out.

So yes, if the question is, how come Columbia caved, These are the people we're talking about.

We're not talking about, like you said, the English department.

And so we might add the nomenclature differs, right?

Like that the trustee, a regent, a supervisor, those are not substantially different, right?

It's just what's on the can.

Right.

Yeah, it's all essentially the same thing.

So let's say we have listeners who are, you know, super wealthy and want to, you know, exert some influence over higher education.

How do we do it?

Let's give the folks some news they can use.

Step by step.

Yeah.

How do I become a trustee at a private university?

Okay.

Well, here is the game plan.

So typically you have to be an alum and a a mega donor, meaning you've donated millions of dollars, and especially if your family has a legacy of bequeathing large gifts.

And private university boards are self-perpetuating, too.

So, honestly, it's hard to just wake up and decide you want to be on a private university board.

You've got to be selected by current members.

And at public state schools, the process is a bit more democratic, and the board is more sensitive to serving public interest.

But at private institutions, the board is almost singularly concerned with growing the endowment or the college trusts.

So yes, to answer the question that you asked earlier, by the nature of their job to hoard and grow wealth for the benefit of a select few, these people are not left-wingers, though they may often be pretty censorious.

I will say, like, generally, the radical left Marxists I encounter are not very good at like making, keeping, or raising money.

It seems like sort of mutually exclusive skill sets.

And we might say that like it also tends to tie universities to specific industries, right?

Like so Stanford's trustees are disproportionately from tech.

I would bet Columbia's are predominantly Wall Streeters.

Is that accurate?

Well, I actually don't know.

I know Columbia has a pretty large board.

They probably are very lopsided towards having experience in Wall Street.

But yeah, like you said, the nature of the institution.

So if a school, for example, is known for its business school,

they're self-perpetuating trustees.

They're going to be alum.

They come from that career field.

So where did this institution or like forum for funding universities come from?

Is this like a Gilded Age invention or did it arise earlier?

Like where does the tradition of the board of trustees begin in the history of U.S.

higher education?

Yeah, it's actually, it goes back way further than that.

One of my colleagues in critical university studies, Ashish Kapur Sadiq, has explained this the best way that I understand it and the way that I explain it to my students.

So the trustee model as it exists for colleges in the U.S.

is a vestige of the British Empire.

So, during the 16th century, European states were creating corporations over all of their colonies, right?

So, it's just a legal arrangement that allows the European monarch to grant investors to run an institution, such as a college, in the colony in the name of the king, right?

While they assume all the expenses and all the risks.

So, these investors are the trustees.

But it's an interesting question because many people will know that the U.S.

college model goes back to like early medieval European institutions meant to train the clergies.

But those actually did not have boards of trustees, right?

The people who ran those medieval institutions were the faculty themselves.

So it's much different in the U.S.

Interesting.

And it's because of that legacy of empire.

And that started almost at the beginning with Harvard and College of William and Mary, basically.

Yeah, so Harvard was our first institution in 1636.

William and Mary, a couple of decades later.

But yeah, they brought that trustee model here.

Wow.

So I thought we could focus on a couple of sort of episodes, stations of the cross, if you will, in this very difficult relationship between a bunch of people doing research and then the sugar daddies that

sustain and/or don't sustain them.

And I thought, given that, well, I'm currently in San Francisco, but Maura is sitting on the Stanford campus, we could start there with a first episode that we might call Jane Jane Stanford v.

Edward Allsworth Ross.

I love this story, and not only because it includes a alleged murder towards the end and begins with a ghost, right?

Yes, yeah.

There's several ghost stories you could tell about Stanford University,

and several murder mysteries you could also tell, but this is one of the more fun ones.

Yeah, Stanford has a great lore.

So the Roth affair is a great example of what happens when a university has one trustee.

The Roth case is a piece of 19th century lore in the history of academic freedom and institutional due process in the U.S.

And so this affair took place at Stanford in the context of a national economic depression and the 1896 election.

So that's populist William Jennings Bryan versus pro-business Republican William McKinley.

And one of Stanford's highly regarded economics professors, Edward Ross, gave lectures across the country advocating more or less for that populist free silver campaign as a way to restore the economy without ever explicitly endorsing william shenanigans bryan or the democrats so stanford was founded in 1891 or opened its doors really in 1891 it's named after leland stanford jr who was at that point already dead but who was around was jane stanford his mother and widow to lean stanford sr.

who was the single trustee i believe at the time and was in fact the president of stanford university with david star jordan who we would today think of as stanford's first president really being more of a caretaker.

She hated this guy, Edward Ellsworth Ross, partly because he criticized exactly the kind of place where the Stanford family had made its name, right?

There's also some racism thrown in there, so we shouldn't like, under no circumstances do you have to hand it to Edward Ellsworth Ross.

But she very clearly just took issue with a member of, quote unquote, her faculty engaging in public speech that she deemed inimical to the interests that, yes, had made this very, very rich university possible.

Yes.

So Ross had a lot to say about the railroad.

And as you mentioned, like all of his political speech kind of ran counter to her own plutocratic politics.

It's interesting that she didn't have a problem with any of the other Stanford faculty who actually openly campaigned for McKinley.

But yeah, we might classify Ross as like a progressive of the late 19th century variety.

So a nativist with some deeply racist beliefs, pretty standard among social scientists of the time, I fear.

But Ross wasn't exactly like a socialist, though he did speak to socialists and labor groups pretty often, which Jane Stanford, the Dowager queen, as one biographer called her, thought made Ross dangerous and an embarrassment to her institution.

And she wanted him out.

And so, yeah, his firing was a huge deal because it triggered a flood of other highly respected professors walking out in protest, so also resigning, going to other places like Chicago.

Johns Hopkins.

And Johns Hopkins, yes.

And Stanford, as a brand new baby institution, that was a pretty big sting, right?

To lose such esteemed members of its faculty.

Yeah.

And I mean, these people then start sort of pushing towards what will become the foundation of the American Association of University Professors, the AUP.

But it's really important to note, too, right?

This is about defending free speech.

This is about defending academic freedom.

It's also about maintaining the professionalization of the university, right?

This university at the time was like four years old.

If people came away with the sense that this was just a finishing school run by Jane Stanford that just happened to have tons of money, you're not going to be taken seriously.

So this is also, the AUP is all about kind of professional self-preservation too.

It's not just about the principles.

Also, this is the only way we can be taken seriously internationally.

It's the only way we can really ask for funding for this stuff.

If all we're doing is kind of like investigating shit that Jane Stanford tells us, like we're just a crank think tank by another name right we're the American Enterprise Institute

which actually will be created shortly after this yeah yeah and it's a good thing that you mentioned like there's this international reputation because universities were brand new in the US right maybe not brand new a couple decades they had existed but our college model had extended back to the 17th century we were just now trying to adopt the German the German model and we didn't quite take all all of the wonderful German concepts of academic freedom, especially not for students.

But yeah, the AAUP came out of the Ross case, along with a couple of others.

Now, we should say that Stanford is obviously kind of an outlier here.

And, you know, James Stanford, as Moira indicated, was dead by probably poisoning before the AAUP was ever founded.

It was not the AAUP that did it, to be clear.

Although, would you blame them if it was?

Possibly not, but

the only culprit that's ever been suggested is, in fact, David Starr Jordan, right?

Either she choked on something or he did it.

He definitely covered it up.

Whoever did it,

he was behind the cover-up.

And there were multiple attempts, too.

Readers should check out the book, Who Killed Jane Stanford by a Stanford faculty member, right?

That's right.

Yeah, by Richard White.

People should check that out.

Yeah.

So here we have really this kind of, I think, what you would call the monarchical model of the school's founder.

That's no longer really the case for any university, nor was it even normal back then outside of what was, you know, pretty recent acquisition in terms of territory.

Normally, a bunch of trustees will kind of jostle for influence or will be joined on a board.

You tend not to make yourself dependent on one single sugar daddy because there are inherent risks that come with it as young Stanford University learned to its own chagrin.

Yes.

And so I thought we could talk about another example.

We could call this episode two, No Child of Mine.

This is Charles Walgreen v.

The University of Chicago.

What happened there?

Oh, gosh.

1935.

Yes.

This is a tale of just one trustee really leading his thumb on the scale in a major way, right?

So even when you have sort of a diversified array of sugar daddies, one of them can really throw his weight around.

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not uncommon for boards to have like dozens of trustees today.

So this case, this is a great example of a different type of plutocratic influence over the college that doesn't necessarily come from the trustees, but from something quite closely linked, and that is corporate interest, right?

So this is an anti-communist story from 1935.

Charles Walgreen, founder of the pharmacy franchise, sort of lost his mind when his niece, whose tuition he was paying to the University of Chicago, told him that she'd been reading the Communist Manifesto and her coursework and that one of her professors was advocating free love.

Now, according to historian of the University of Chicago, John Boyer, she was just teasing him, but he took literally her attempt to get a rise out of him.

So he brought this claim about, you know, Marxism and free love to the Chicago Tribune.

And from there, it got picked up nationally through the Hearst Press.

And this is 1935 again.

And at that point, the Illinois legislature got involved and the state senate opened an investigation into the University of Chicago.

And the entire investigation was pretty comical.

Walgreen himself appeared before the Senate hearing, spouting off against, you know, communism and indoctrination.

But the accused faculty, when it was time for their defense, conceded, like, yes, we did assign our students to read from Karl Marx so that we could look at the communist manifesto critically.

So after all of the defense's evidence was put to the public, Walgreen kind of had a bit of egg on his face.

There wasn't really any evidence of indoctrination taking place, or not communist indoctrination anyway.

And of course, by the 1930 standards of yellow journalism, the Hearst papers ran these stories as salaciously as possible.

And they often made a mockery of Charles Walgreen, who ultimately was pretty embarrassed by the entire ordeal.

So by the time everything was over, Walgreen did like an about face and ultimately gave the university over half a million dollars in the 1930s to found

a free market pro-American program at the university that would eventually become the notorious Chicago School of Economics and ruin lots of economies in Latin America and the global south.

Which is so interesting, right?

Like one of the sort of successes of this system seems to me that like, that for a long time at least, it was able to absorb these outside shocks and turn them into money.

It really took literally the like, the best cure for speech you don't like is more speech, but in this case, all speech costs money.

And so they're like, hey, so if you're so mad at what we're teaching, why don't you donate some money and we teach the opposite thing too, right?

The fact that Walgreen, I don't think it was an about phase in some way, like the fact that Walgreen gets, like he gets ropodoped to some extent by the university.

But on the other hand, like that was sort of the agreement, right?

That like if you, if you don't like what the hose of cash is buying right now, you create your own hose of cash and we'll we'll accommodate that too.

Yeah, it's balance is actually what they like to call it.

Yes.

That's something that goes all the way back to this period that we're talking about.

And so yeah, I mean, we can say in the long run, Dr.

Walgreen got got his way with the University of Chicago, although it sounds like none of us are really convinced that what was being taught was really actually counter to the pharmacists' own capitalist logic.

But I also have to say, do we know how much?

I actually, I've told this story so many times myself.

Yeah, it's 12 million.

12 million, right?

But do we know how much the tuition was?

Oh, no, that's a great question.

Because I'm wondering, like, did he have this shit fit over like, because like, wasn't tuition like bupkis?

Like, he's like, $45?

That's it.

I'm talking to the Illinois state legislature, and they're like, well, I mean, you at least have to give him his money back.

This is a situation where a, I'm guessing, like, teenage girl who's teasing her uncle and trying to get a rise out of him accidentally, like a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world,

winds up setting off a chain of events that ruins several Latin American economies.

Right.

So, like, ladies, you never know the influence you can have

just when you're trying to make fun of the old guy in your family.

Yeah.

What is that famous video that's going around right now?

We'll adapt that to say, are you reading Karl Marx in school?

Shut the fuck up.

Don't tell your reactionary uncle.

Don't let him know, even though he might really like the lesson.

I'm still trying to Google tuition, but I mean, I don't think it was very much.

There's no way it could have been.

I mean, unless they fleeced Walgreen too, which at that point would have been awesome.

So Walgreen sort of exemplifies, at least in the way I've always understood this story, the kind of more creaturely response, right?

He's the donor who doesn't like what his donation is making possible, right?

As old as people forking over their money for things they don't understand.

The way that the media were sort of treating it and being like, look at this weirdo loon.

It was sort of unserious.

But after World War II, we get two things.

On the one hand, the trustees actually become less important because the federal government starts stepping in.

But at the same time, we start getting in the nascent conservative movement, really a theory of the case as to why Charles Walgreen was right, right?

Charles Walgreen does not appear to have had a theory past, I'm right.

I hate communism.

But with the 1950s, we really start getting a theory as to why people like him are owed this kind of deference and maybe more deference than the people actually teaching or running the institution, right?

And for that, I thought we could go to episode three, getting our favorite guy in here,

William F.

Fucking Buckley versus Yale University, God and Man.

Friend of the show, William F.

Buckley.

Yes, that great theorist.

Yes.

Yeah, so here we go.

Finally, someone who will think of the trustees, right?

Buckley is their guy.

So William F.

Buckley Jr., listeners will know, was the son of an oil magnate, Bill Buckley Sr., and then on his mom's side, he was the descendant of southern planters and a 1950 graduate of Yale, where he was a member of the Storied Skull and Bone Society.

So you really couldn't design a more fitting caricature of an American conservative, actually.

And maybe the only mark against him was the fact that he was a devout Catholic in Waspie, Connecticut.

And we should say that he then reacted to graduating from Yale and having a gilded future ahead of him in the most healthy way possible, which is he wrote a book about all the things he didn't like, which I have to say is the last relatable thing that he did.

But the idea of like everyone graduating college should like writing a teardown screed of it a year later.

I think more people should do this.

That's phenomenal.

That's that's some Larry David shit.

But yeah, he uses this experience he had at Yale, which appears to have been not at all negative, really, for a full frontal attack on liberalism.

Yeah, yeah, everybody should write a screed after graduating college and launch your career and launch a political movement because it's basically exactly what this book did.

But yeah, there's no greater champion of power or enemy of liberalism than Buckley, who in 1951 published the book you just mentioned, Guide a Man at Yale, The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.

Superstitions.

Exactly.

And academic freedom, by the way, is in quotes.

It's in like skill quotes in the actual, like, yeah, in the actual title.

But the book's central claim was that Yale faculty were indoctrinating the sons of the elite with socialism and atheism.

And his prescription was for parents, alumni, trustees, and anybody else with power to quit cutting checks to the school until it righted the ship and went back to professing Christianity and capitalism.

It's really similar to Trump's approach to the Ives today, actually.

But yeah, God and Man at Yale both launched Buckley's career as a thought leader and the post-war conservative movement.

It really kind of like put his name out into the public, even though the book wasn't well received at the time.

It got lots of negative reviews.

Yeah.

There's that famous passage.

Let me read really quickly from Buckley here because this really emblematizes what is essentially an auto golpe

for the board of trustees.

Like the people who graduated from this institution and who have somehow sustained it financially ought to be seizing the reins of power from the freaks that teach and study there.

So here's what Buckley says in God and Man at Yale.

One thing is clear.

It is time that honest and discerning scholars cease to manipulate the term academic freedom for their own ends and in such fashion as to deny the rights of individuals.

For, in the last analysis, academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.

Yeah, he does this weird like Darvo logic where the academic freedom is the freedom of the parents and the alumni, right?

And the trustees, yeah.

Yes, and not the freedom of the faculty.

Yeah.

In a characteristic move, William F.

Buckley is in favor of the freedom of William F.

Buckley and people like him.

Not so hot on everyone else's.

Yes.

But I mean, that book has really left a legacy, but the book's complaints were not original to Buckley, right?

We just talked about the Walgreen case in Chicago, and that was from 15 years before.

And in fact, one of the anniversary reprints of the book, in that Buckley credited much of its content to his mentor, self-described right-wing radical Frank Chordorov, who was himself a disciple of the anarchist libertarian Albert J.

Knott.

And Chordorov is one of my favorite figures when it comes to enemies of the college.

He was sort of like a neocon 100 years before neocons.

He's a secular Jew born on the lower west side, Manhattan, to Russian parents in 1887.

And he attended Columbia at a time when the Ives were doing everything they could to keep the, quote, socially undesirable out, meaning Jews, Catholics, other Eastern and Southern European immigrants.

And Columbia and Penn were both pretty exceptional for their small Jewish enrollment at the turn of the century, but it was something that they were trying to tamp back on.

But at Columbia, Chordorov, again, this is the person that Buckley credits with lots of the arguments in his book.

Chordurov was a contemporary of the educational philosopher John Dewey and others that he thought were like socialists.

And he drew a lot of energy by doing battle against his classmates.

And from those experiences, he determined that colleges were in need of a revolution, but the only way to achieve it was to train an entire new generation of faculty for the right.

So by the 1950s, Chorudurov had gathered enough financial backing from sympathetic millionaires to create a counter to the intercollegiate socialist society.

So he called his the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, ISI, which actually still exists, but they're the Intercollegiate Studies Institute today.

But yeah, Chordorov branded this as an alternative university within the university.

So this is like a long-term subversive project because it's happening on your campuses.

But basically, the way it works is that conservative faculty could identify promising undergraduates and connect them with donors who would pay for their PhDs to make sure that they joined the faculty.

And then we will just have future generations of faculty for the rights causes.

And Buckley was ISI's first president.

That's right.

And I mean, we might point out that like things like ISI, when you look at the kind of demands that the Trump administration just sort of sent to Harvard, which finally sent the universities into rebellion against the kind of dogeification of higher ed.

And for those of our readers who've not been fortunate enough to be blessed with the incredible letter that Harvard University got from the task force on anti-Semitism that the Trump administration created across various departments, here is one thing that this letter says.

And I quote: By August 2025, the university shall commission an external party which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.

Nothing chilling about that.

Sorry, that's me.

The letter goes on: quote, every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity.

Every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.

So you just got to keep adding students, apparently, until enough of them check the Republican box on,

I don't know, on a survey you give them?

Are you going to to depose them?

Right.

When someone applies for a faculty position at Stanford, I don't ask them how they vote.

And if they're, you know, a specialist on Johannes Brahms, like, how the fuck am I going to know how this person votes?

Well, the one way you can know is through the ISI rollodex, which is essentially what the suggestion is, right?

I'm not saying, Harvard, you need to hire people who have conservative thoughts or feel conservative feelings, is to say people who travel in our right-wing networks, right?

Like pick the people that have been funded by ISI, that are in our speaker roster, that have had a sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute, et cetera, et cetera.

In some way, they've been creating this kind of shadow university in order for it to at some point supplant the real thing.

Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up AEI.

I like that description too, as like the Rolodex of members who could be like.

qualified faculty for diverse perspectives when they literally all like talk and read about the same things.

Okay, so I have this like grand theory about the right and its relationship with higher education.

They sort of have like three approaches on how to control it.

One is like work from within.

So that's ISI.

That's the model that Chordurov set off.

But another approach is to set up like an alternate model.

So going back to the 1920s, there were religious conservatives who were sort of like horrified by the scientific consensus around the theory of evolution.

So they like trailblazed this separatist approach.

So Bob Jones College, now Bob Jones University, was founded in 1927 by the son of a Confederate veteran who envisioned an evangelical college that would serve as this like Christian training center.

And then shortly thereafter, getting into the 1930s, about the time of the Walgreen University of Chicago debacle, there are all of these like anti-New Deal industry magnates that provide seed money to create these free market think tanks, including American Enterprise Institute, but also the Foundation for Economic Education, which Chordorov was a part of.

And these research centers are that separatist approach, right?

The whole idea behind them at the time was to produce capitalist educational materials as part of a propaganda war against FDR's administration.

Listeners will remember that Roosevelt had this brain trust, a cadre of academic experts behind the president's Keynesian solutions to the Great Depression.

So these conservative groups saw the importance of having parallel academic institutes to to sort of like challenge the singular authority of academics in the college, right?

On the U.S.

economy in this case.

Yeah.

And so just in case you thought that Bari Weiss ever had an original thought in her life, right?

She's running a virtually antediluvian model, right?

Like of like you found an alternate institution, you grift rich right-wing dudes into supporting it.

Third step, profit, right?

Like what is the phrase that then comes up, I think, in the 70s is the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

And it segues straight into a pitch.

We have to build our own institutions.

All I need is a couple of hundred million dollars and a very good salary for myself, and then we should be fine, right?

You know, in some way, what is happening now with the Trump administration really is the dog catching the car.

This para-university system, I think, was never seriously meant to replace the university.

But in some way, they figured, hey, we can get the same amount of money out of rich people as Harvard does, but we don't have to teach anyone Latin.

We're just going to put out weird trolly papers about how the consensus on climate change is actually cancel culture or whatever.

We're going to fund a study that shows that race science was right all along.

A little more darkly, but you know, it's interesting because some of this is what we might call like structural conservatism, right?

Like, because the kinds of people who sit on these boards tend not to be, you know, wild radical lefties, right?

So Buckley really was glomming onto something real.

It really is kind of remarkable that for a long time, U.S.

higher education got and to some extent continues to get rich people to shell out money for stuff that they kind of had to hate that opposed their own material interests, right?

Like the rich folks who are structurally and personally incentivized to be conservatives do wind up funding a lot of left-wing thinking, right?

So following Buckley, there's been also a drive to radicalize these trustees, to get them to be more than just empty suits.

So what is this like trustee activism and where does that come from?

Yeah, so there's a central organization for this and it's the American Council on Trustees and Alumni.

So ACTA is the acronym.

They are behind all sorts of stuff.

Listeners may be familiar with the James G.

Martin Center for Academic Renewal in North Carolina.

ACTA is behind that, as well as a bunch of other initiatives that basically train trustees to push the argument that they should be determining curriculum over their state institutions rather than the faculty experts.

The right-wing organization, National Association of Scholars, NAS, has literally challenged trustees not to be empty suits.

It's a direct quote.

It's on their blog.

But they urge them to use their authority to do stuff like abolish DEI initiatives or even take away resources from faculty who have have suspicious politics.

One of the big names behind this business mogul, Art Pope, funds three centers and think tanks in North Carolina's research triangle alone.

So, the James G.

Martin Center, also, the Civitas Institute, also the John Locke Foundation.

Pope was also a key donor in the Red Map project to secure racially gerrymandered voting districts in the state to the benefit of Republican candidates.

And he's now a trustee on the University of North Carolina Board of Governors.

So, yeah, I mean, when they call for intellectual diversity, like if if you just like peek behind the curtain, all of the money comes from right-wing donors.

All of the projects are very conservative.

Even when they talk about like being in favor of a liberal arts or classically liberal education, these are really just dog whistles.

And they sound, you know, they're convincing to people who are open-minded and not quite tuned into the dog whistle of what like classical liberalism is.

We hadn't really talked about the HPCUs, even though initially I mentioned them.

What is the role of race in all this?

Because it also, of course, is a group that is overwhelmingly white.

Has the role of race in sort of trustee influence at the university, has that shifted over time?

It shifted over time, definitely, because all of the trustees at our original HBCUs were white.

Right.

Well into like 70s, 80s, 90s.

It's not quite the case today, although there are lots of white trustees.

It's a good question.

I mean, the Trump administration, both in its current term and the first term, sort of championed it or positioned itself as a champion of the HBCUs.

I haven't really thought too deeply about that.

Of course, I'm extremely cynical about it, but I do think it's a way for them to say, yes, we have black colleges.

We have colleges for people who aren't white, and we need to keep them around because that's where we want non-white students going.

Whereas at our state institutions and some of our elite private institutions, no woateness, no DEI, right?

That's sort of the the outlook there.

We had a wonderful interview with Saida Grundy about the Morehouse man, and she pointed to the fact that it just creates this very basic disconnect where almost, as you said, almost all trustees at major institutions are alumni.

And HBCUs find themselves steered by people who...

as you say, until the late 90s really overwhelmingly were not.

Meaning you really are in a situation where of a kind of paternalistic model, right?

The Buckley thing doesn't sound quite as awful and tin-eared when you're saying, well, it's people who graduated recently, who were students not too long ago.

It's very different when it's like, oh, it's this nice white man who takes a great interest in you, but would never send his kids here, right?

Like, okay.

It's definitely paternalistic.

There's just no way around that.

Matt Siebold has, if I can do another podcast recommendation, Matt Siebold has a really great podcast called American Vandal.

This past season, season 11, I think he's done a lot of discussions of HBCUs and the problems that they face when they accept multi-million dollar grants from people who are sort of like kind of nefarious actors, right?

People who are interested in AIifying the school and things like that.

Jelani Favors is someone who's talked about this a lot as well.

Lots of smart commentators on that.

Yeah.

So

as our final act, I thought we could talk about the next interesting permutation and the evolution of the trustee, which is the, wait, does he even go here version?

You know, this is a figure that I've become very, very interested in in my own work on Silicon Valley, which is the dropout.

As you say, a lot of time building trustee relations is about the university intersecting with these frankly dynastic families that have long intergenerational connections to this particular school.

Well, this becomes a problem if the most famous people making boatloads of cash around you famously don't finish college.

But, like, after a year and a half, we're like, fuck it, I'm out.

I'm going to be a billionaire now.

And then you're now chasing their cash.

That's not to say that, like, most of our trustees today, I mean, are still obviously like graduates, but it has to have changed.

The silicon valification of wealth has, I think, put pressure on some parts of the trustee model, hasn't it?

Yeah, I don't think the trustee model will go anywhere just because it's so baked in, but I definitely think, you know, the Silicon Valley model, I mean, those guys brag about how they drop out.

They brag about how they never finish college.

Yeah.

So I'm not sure how that relationship is going to play out.

But another sort of tendency I've noticed, though, is the broligarchs.

wear as a badge of honor the fact that they dropped out, but also it seems like they are trying to create their own parallel institutions, right?

It's like on-the-job training or, you know, we do the inventions here.

It's sort of like, I mean, higher ed has long had this relationship with private industry where, you know, certain departments are sort of like in the bag of the Rand Corporation or what have you.

But this does seem to be something a little bit newer.

So, yeah, I mean, to be determined, it doesn't look good for the colleges.

No.

I mean, what is the Thiel Fellowship if not an alternate institution directly competing with higher ed, right?

Like very explicitly, right?

You cannot get that fellowship unless you drop out.

And they are positioning the right-wing money, the right-wing sort of professional pipeline as an education that rivals or indeed surpasses that of the university.

Yeah, I think, I do think it has some institutions sort of shaking a little bit, but

it almost seems like this is something that the Democrats have been faced with, like where it's like they're having to constantly try to move to the right because they feel like American opinion is moving to the right.

So if colleges feel like their prospective student body is no longer interested in going to college, they're going to have to do something to make themselves look like disruptors of, you know, the things that they are.

So, I mean, in that way, they'll maybe some elite institutions, maybe some Stanfords might chase after potential students that way.

But yeah, I don't know.

It's curious to live through and keep an eye on.

Yeah.

And I think that the place where people can watch these kind of dynamics play out is actually, I think, in the recent fights around Harvard.

So not the most recent ones, but the ones from last year, right?

This is the Bill Ackman v.

Harvard part of the episode.

This is not about Ackman himself, but I was very struck by this.

I don't know if you guys read this recent piece in The New Yorker by Nathan Heller.

I think it's called, Will Harvard Bend or Break?

Where he talks about Sam Lesson, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who graduated from Harvard in 2005 and I think like made his money as a Facebook guy and as a long-term donor, but I should mention, I believe, not a member of the Board of Trustees yet.

And and he says to talk about how he thinks about what the quote-unquote problem is at harvard which they're talking about anti-semitism they're talking about about wokeness they're talking about ideological capture all the kind of stalking horses of sort of political correctness cancel culture panic but he says So I'm going to just quote Heller here, quoting Lesson.

Lesson told me he shares a widespread donor view that at a moment when universities become large and growth-oriented, more like companies, scholars are the wrong people to guide their trajectory.

And that's a quote from Lesson.

The wild card is the faculty.

They're the hardest thing to solve for, he said.

The students change every four years, so you can make a mistake, put the wrong people in, select for the wrong things and fix it.

And quote, scholars were often there for life and held misguided sway.

Quote, the faculty is a unique characteristic of universities versus companies, he noted.

It is not clear what to do about it.

That to me, I was like, holy motherfucking shirt balls.

Like, this is the quiet part out loud, right?

Like, the faculty, a problem to be solved.

students too, by the way, a problem to be solved by these kind of Silicon Valley solutionists.

And it's basically the university treated as, I don't know, you're unprofitable startup that requires the unbelievable brainpower of, you know, fucking Twitter or Tesla, because we all know how much money they make, to function properly, right?

The wording is so chilling, but it's so confident.

And it's like, it's funny because it's language that we see all the time that we know so well.

But I do think it's new to have it applied to higher ed in quite so straightforward a fashion.

And it's interesting that it's in an article not about like Harvard's finances, which are great.

It's not about dissatisfaction with Harvard's education, which I've not been, but apparently it's great.

It is about ideological questions, right?

Like that's the back door through which it's let in.

This is Buckley all the way down, but it in the end says like, no, this institution itself is subversive of American goodness in its constitution it must therefore be turned into your shitty you know cat picture startup or whatever yeah it needs to be turned into hillsdale that's like the ideal model for what they want can you explain a little bit what hillsdale college is we have a lot of international listeners they may not get the same youtube ads i get

oh gosh uh well international listeners i'm so sorry to to burden you with this hillsdale college is a religious college in hillsdale michigan and it has been touted by right-wing thought leaders leaders, people like the Christopher Rufos of the world, as like an ideal model institution.

It is an avowedly religious, I shouldn't even say religious, it's a Christian institution, and they teach the classical liberal arts curriculum that the right is so excited about.

Now, I want to be very clear when they say classical liberal arts, they want to focus on the history and philosophy of Europe, right?

The great books of Western literature, classical civilizations of Greece and Rome, legal and religious histories, but it's telling what those subjects leave out, always the history ideas and literature of non-white America, right, and the rest of the world.

So, for example, at Hillsdale, your American history lessons about the founding will leave out the horrors of settler colonialism.

They won't even mention indigenous genocide.

They present American history as like of uniquely northern European heritage, as if the U.S.

has only ever had a white past.

And descriptors of this type of education as classical will point to its openness and its humanness, but it's ironic because they only ever focus on the works of so-called dead white men, right?

No other civilizations prize humanism.

So you can sort of see how this is like a departure from like the actual openness, right?

So when they talk about ideological balance or ideological diversity, these are all just dog whistles.

It's all just language games.

Really, it's a curriculum of like genteel white supremacy.

Yeah.

What was I talking about before that?

I don't even remember.

Oh, but you seem to have a slightly different interpretation of the quote that Heller brings

from this Silicon Valley investor.

Yeah.

I mean, the thing is, like.

That's actually already been solved for.

Like, not at Harvard, where

several, I don't know the percentage of faculty that have tenure there, but nationwide, only 25% of faculty actually have tenure and are problems to be solved if you don't like them.

For the rest of us, like I work in a right-to-work stake, I can be fired anytime.

Right.

Just contract not renewed.

75% of our faculty or teachers on our campuses do not have tenure.

That's a very good point.

And of course, my guess is that the solution that Lesson is probably thinking of is further casualization of labor, right?

That is,

you've heard me say this before, Lauren.

These right-wing moral panics, especially around sort of free speech and cancel culture, are both often outputs of labor casualization.

That is to say, you know, the only reason we're hearing about it is because someone might get fired, and then they become a motor for more of it, right?

Like the only solution, quote unquote, or the only punishment that anyone can think of is to throw the bums out.

It's basically a snake eating its own tail, and the snake is casualized labor, labor precarity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One day they'll wind up with a university that is just a board of trustees and then they'll finally be at peace.

Just a board of trustees and a football team

and a winning sports program.

That's it.

Yeah, I mean, we could suggest to them if they could still teach it at that point, Bertha Brecht's famous 1953 poem, The Solution.

Do you all know this?

No.

After the uprising of 17th of June, the Secretary of the Writers' Union had leaflets distributed in the Stalinale stating that the people had forfeited the confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts.

Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?

So yeah, wouldn't it be easier for Bill Ackman to dissolve Harvard and elect himself a new university?

I have heard that before and I've always heard it in the context of we need new voters.

Awesome.

Well, thank you so much, Lauren.

This was really great and really helpful.

I learned so much.

Thank you so much for sharing your time with us.

Yeah, I appreciate the invitation.

It was great to be here.

We should, again, emphasize for people that, you you know, we can really barely scratch the surface in the hour that we have here.

Please check out American Campus.

It's an absolutely phenomenal and really just impressive work.

It really is what it says on the tin.

It is a history of higher education, answering questions you didn't even know you had.

Like I didn't, the dorm stuff, for instance, I just forgot that I had had that question.

I was like, oh, thank God American Campus is there for me.

And every time you find something fascinating to draw out with your guests, the only sort of negative side effect it has is that it makes it even more impossible to engage with these kind of bad faith, very distortive campus narratives because you just end up sputtering like, none of this is right.

This is how any of that works.

So that's the problem.

But you get out of it really deep knowledge of a part of American society that both is deeply consequential.

to our politics, it turns out much more consequential than some of its critics had allowed, and that is frankly currently under assault.

So with that, thank you all for listening.

Thank you for supporting us, and yeah, go yell at a trustee.

Embed with the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com.

Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

Our title music is by Katie Lau.