They Bought the Universities and Called It Civility

They bought the universities. Koch money, Heritage money, the Manhattan-Institute-and-Federalist-Society apparatus, with sixty million federal dollars thrown in by an administration that calls itself conservative — money the Department of Education tied, in its own grant language, to last year’s killing of the far-right commentator Charlie Kirk — and they called what they bought “civility.” A recent Guardian investigation of the so-called “dialogue industry” — a $200 million-a-year ecosystem of campus “viewpoint diversity” centers, listening workshops, and AI chatbots that promise to teach America’s students to talk across their differences — has done something useful. It read the receipts. Twenty of the twenty-three foundations most active in this space also fund conservative policy networks or pro-Israel outfits. Seventy percent of the dialogue centers launched across more than a hundred campuses have been accused of suppressing pro-Palestinian activism. The “bipartisan agreement” on civility turns out to be bipartisan only about which questions may not be asked. This is not bipartisan bridge-building. It is a hostile capture of the student experience, financed by the architects of the right-wing culture war that has been escalating since the 2017 Berkeley protests.

I’ll grant the steelman, because the steelman is real. The Berkeley protests of 2017, the fights over speaker disinvitations, the steady drumbeat of students shouted down for saying things the loudest people in the room did not want to hear — there is a genuine civic problem here, and the impulse to teach young people to listen is not crazy. Aristotle thought rhetoric was teachable. The American college, for most of its history, was supposed to be a place where a man was forced to defend his claims against the best argument his adversary could muster. The dialogues of the parishes and granges of my own county taught me more about holding a position under fire than any lecture hall ever did. The instinct behind a well-run conversation across disagreement is not the problem. The University of Wisconsin-Madison — the nearest land-grant to my own place — was built on the principle that useful knowledge should reach the people who would use it. That institution is worth wanting.

The problem is the machine. The problem is what has been built in the name of that instinct, with whose money, and to what end. The Guardian’s reporting traces a pipeline from Charles Koch’s foundations, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Federalist Society, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Trump administration’s Department of Education into a parallel university that exists to teach America’s students that the way to handle a hard question is to hold hands and sing. A $10 million investment from a foundation tied to David Einhorn — whose family has backed outfits like Turning Point USA — was announced last April for the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, which now works with 135 university presidents. The Constructive Dialogue Institute, co-founded by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, has put more than 200,000 students through its “Perspectives” course. Harvard, Yale, and New York University have made it mandatory. The Koch brothers’ foundations, long the vanguard of the right-wing campus takeover, are a pivotal engine of this very industry. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison — in the year of our Lord 2026 — the dialogue initiative is a chatbot. This is what your movement means by neutral.

Let me be plain about what a conservative should see here, because I am one. The thing the right claims to conserve — free inquiry, robust argument, the university as the one institution in American life where an uncomfortable idea is met with a better idea rather than a velvet rope — has been bought. The civility industry is a laundering operation. It takes concentrated donor money, runs it through the respectable vocabulary of listening and humility, and produces an apparatus whose principal effect, in the places it has been most heavily deployed, has been to make one set of political questions impossible to ask on campus. You do not need to share the politics of the students who were shouting about Gaza to see that a regime which makes one subject unavailable for dialogue is not a regime of dialogue. You only need to remember what a university is for. Even a $21 million fund ostensibly established to combat antisemitism on a single campus can end up targeting the dissent of the very faculty it was nominally designed to protect. At the City University of New York, pro-Palestinian student leaders — graduate students like Leila Markosian, dragged into “constructive dialogue” workshops after facing arrests — were explicitly told that their grievances were out of bounds, lectured that dialogue is a “post-conflict tool” to be used only after pacification. The message is unmistakable: protest is a failure of manners, and the cure is compliance. Polarization is not a disease to be cured by a seminar; it is the engine of social progress. The demand that students sit in a circle and eloquently listen to their oppressors is not a radical act of empathy. It is a demand for surrender. The right does not want dialogue; it wants disarmament.

The betrayers will tell you this is what the left did first — and they will be partly right, which is the part that makes the betrayal easier. Yes, the speech codes. Yes, the de-platformings. Yes, the long decade in which a conservative speaker could not appear on a campus without a security perimeter and a therapy dog. I was angry about it then, and I am not now defending it. The correct response to a left that captured the university and used it to enforce its own priors is not a right that captures the university and uses it to enforce its priors and calls the second capture “viewpoint diversity.” That is not a conservatism. That is a revenge. The thing that was supposed to be conserved was the institution, not the revenge. The conservative mind, in the tradition I was raised in, does not trade one capture for another. It defends the institution against both.

Here is the deeper thing the receipt trail is hiding. The same donor architecture that built the civility industry is the same donor architecture that has spent forty years hollowing out the rest of American civil society — the local paper, the parish, the lodge, the county fair, the small farm cooperative. They took the railroad and the mill. They consolidated the farms. They replaced the cooperative with the contract grower. They did this, in the name of efficiency, and they called what they did freedom. Now they are doing it to the university, in the name of civility, and calling that freedom too. The vocabulary changes. The money is the same money. The institution goes the same way. A nation cannot be Christian. Only a person can, and only with difficulty; and a university cannot be made free by people who have spent a career making other institutions less free. The work is the work; the operator is the operator.

What gets built instead is the institution that was always supposed to be there. Not the donor-captured university with its chatbot in residence and its required “Perspectives” course. Not the federal-grant university that takes sixty million from the Department of Education to study the problem the Department of Education just helped create. The university as the co-op is the co-op: an institution owned by its members — the students, the faculty, the staff — and governed by them, accountable upward to a learned community rather than downward to a donor’s preferences. The first universities were guilds of teachers and learners. The land-grant universities of the late nineteenth century were, in their best days, partnerships between a state and its farmers, designed to bring useful knowledge to people who would use it. The Catholic university, in the tradition I come from, was supposed to be a community ordered toward the truth — Aquinas’s veritas — and a community is not a pipeline. A community is not a foundation. A community is not a chatbot. A community is what a donor’s check, by its very structure, cannot buy. The earth was given for all, and a university bought with a check belongs to the check, not to the people.

I do not expect this generation to fix it. The fight is mostly lost, and I have been around long enough to know what that looks like. I will say what I have always said on this page: conserve what, exactly? The thing that called itself conservatism, and that I once voted for, has now been turned against the institutions it claimed to conserve. The donors are not conservatives. They are operators. The right that calls itself the right has not conserved the family, the parish, the small town, or the university; it has consolidated them, sold them, and is now selling the civility with which to mourn the loss. I am not in the mourning business. I am in the building business. The thing to build is small, and member-owned, and accountable to the people who do the work. The thing to build is the cooperative, in every institution the donors have hollowed. The thing to build is the kind of university a town can own. The thing to build is what they cannot buy.