The Real Enemy of Academic Freedom: The Mellon Foundation’s Campaign Against Viewpoint Diversity

By Daniel McCarthy
Tuesday, 16 June 2026 05:10 AM EDT

Does academic freedom have a greater enemy than the American Association of University Professors?

With millions of dollars in backing from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the AAUP recently established a Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF) that’s about as accurately named as the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984.”

Instead of defending academic freedom, the director of the AAUP’s center aims to eliminate the last remnants of viewpoint diversity on today’s campuses.

In the face of overwhelming hostility from hiring committees — and often outright, illegal discrimination — conservative academics and even traditional liberals have been forced to seek positions outside regular departments in new “civics centers” on campuses nationwide. Places like the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education have become havens for scholars who cannot find acceptance in the mainstream academic system.

Even a tenured Harvard professor at the top of his field, such as Renaissance historian James Hankins, has relocated to the Hamilton School after finding the progressive-dominated academic mainstream intolerable. There, his students are judged on scholarly merit rather than the color of their skin or political affiliations.

Yet instead of championing fairness and intellectual diversity, the CDAF director seeks strategies to undermine institutions like the Hamilton School.

“Like, naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining the legitimacy,” said CDAF director Issac Kamola in a recording obtained by John Sailer. “I would love to strategically map who these fers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out.”

There is significant financial backing for decades-long efforts to steer American colleges and universities toward political leftism — the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has an endowment of nearly $8 billion.

According to Tyler Austin Harper’s analysis, “the foundation’s virtual monopoly on humanities funding means it has the power to remake entire fields according to its desires.”

Under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, who became president of the organization in 2018, Mellon has embraced a more utilitarian and politically driven approach to the humanities.

In his report revealing Kamola’s remarks and the AAUP’s activities, Sailer states: “CDAF appears to be part of a larger but covert ‘rapid response’ project funded by Mellon,” and quotes Kamola discussing a budget potentially worth $10 million for creating an organization designed to swiftly eliminate opposition.

The academic establishment is resisting attempts by states and the federal government to restore fairness and accountability on campuses.

The AAUP views itself as an aristocracy: untouchable, unaccountable, and entitled to live off others’ labor. Yet this is insufficient — the mere existence of alternative academic institutions like the Hamilton Center is deemed intolerable.

For these AAUP advocates, academic freedom means the freedom to impose absolute conformity. Thanks to the Mellon Foundation’s resources, they believe they have the financial means to enforce it.

The state of higher education today demonstrates just what Mellon’s millions can achieve: as academic standards decline and students struggle to read complete books, recitations of ideology crowd out serious discourse on ideas. In fact, institutions that should champion academic freedom are turning it inside out.

The AAUP should be ashamed, but Americans cannot wait for such an organization to reform itself.

Higher education institutions receive billions in taxpayer funds — whether through federal grants or state governments. They must have academic freedom without the freedom from accountability to law and to their educational mission.

Civics centers represent an effort to restore the original character of universities, but they are not safe from the progressive bureaucracies that surround them or the activist academics who seek to destroy them.

If the director of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is determined to “increase the political costs and decrease legitimacy” of such centers, then stronger remedies are needed than building gated communities of traditional scholarship within what amounts to a one-party state.

The only way to protect civic centers, viewpoint diversity, and academic freedom is to continue efforts that have begun under the Trump administration to hold higher education accountable.

Just as street freedom does not mean criminals’ freedom to mug and murder, academic freedom does not grant the right to end everyone else’s freedom to teach and learn.