If you were naive and read that the American Association of University Professors, using a grant from the Mellon Foundation, had a project to defend academic freedom, you might think they intended to defend academic freedom.
On the other hand, if you were familiar with Critical Theory, you would raise your eyebrows and assume that they were in the censorship business, because these people deploy words as weapons, relying on people associating the ordinary meaning of words with what you say, thus giving the liar power to shape a false reality.
I wanted to see what "The Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom" did in practice. So I FOIAed the emails of one of its fellows. They included links to meeting audio, transcripts, grant records, and more.
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) June 11, 2026
The results were eye-opening.https://t.co/xNTB6DKyxv
John Sailer, of the invaluable Manhattan Institute, followed his instincts and FOIAed emails about the project, and guess what? It's an anti-liberal project that works to suppress ideas incompatible with leftist ideology.
Critical theorists follow a simple principle with regard to freedom, captured by Frank Herbert in Children of Dune:
“When I am Weaker Thn You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.”
That is the paradox of living in a Liberal society that is fighting totalitarians. We believe in freedom, even for those with horrific beliefs; totalitarians believe in ideological enforcement, and will censor or kill those with whom they disagree when they can.
Academic leftists are totalitarians. We can't censor or kill them and remain true to our beliefs, but we sure as hell don't have to employ them, give them grants, or allow them to run our schools and universities. They deserve ridicule and ostracization, not power.
The group reserves special ire for the new civics centers, like the UF's Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education.
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) June 11, 2026
Here's its president, Isaac Kamola, again saying he wants to run projects that will boost their "political cost" and decrease their "legitimacy." pic.twitter.com/JUIX3L2hFu
When you listen to these recordings, no ordinary person could think, "Yeah, academic freedom looks exactly like that." On the contrary, what they are doing is plotting to suppress and destroy their ideological opponents, not have a debate with them.
That, of course, is incompatible with the very notion of academic freedom, which, ironically, began to flourish in Catholic universities in the Middle Ages. That may surprise you, and certainly academics were not wholly free in a modern sense, but scholars, including Martin Luther, were given great freedom to challenge orthodoxy within academic institutions, and Church fathers actually read the works of dissenters and took them seriously.
What they did not do is embrace the spread of these ideas outside the universities, at least until they were vetted and approved. That's not a mirror of what we consider "academic freedom," but it was the genesis of it. The Critical Theorists want to go farther than even the Church back then. We think of Luther as the revolutionary, which he was, but attempts to suppress him really intensified when he publicly challenged the Church in public.
Critical theorists want to cut off even the academic realm from conservatives. Their preferred model is based on the Chinese Communist Party approach.
As I've reported before, Mellon does exactly that: funding faculty through the like of the UC's "President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program" and UVA's "Race, Place, and Equity" program, which eventually make universities pick up the tab. https://t.co/s5cU77WlYG
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) June 11, 2026
The power they have at least partly derives from the flood of outside money coming from Foundations and donors, who can make administrators grovel and plead. Institutions that once really were interested in free debate are now vassals to leftists who control billions of dollars. University presidents live or die by donations, not by making their institutions centers of learning and research.
Mellon wants it? Mellon gets it.
This, of course, raises questions about what Mellon has been up to in the two years since its stopped updating its grants database. At the very least, the center itself seems to have more funding, so reformers should expect more pushback.https://t.co/xNTB6DKyxv
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) June 11, 2026
Same, of course, with Qatar, or other large donors. Dangle a few million, no less $10 million, and they will do what you want.
Pathetic, but it's the reality.
Of course, none of this is shocking if you have been following the collapse of academia as a pillar of Western Civilization. It is depressing, but business as usual.
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