Thread by @JohnDSailer

NEW: The Mellon Foundation gave $1.5 million to establish a "center for the defense of academic freedom."

In audio I've obtained, the group's leader says his goal is to undermine the newly launched classical civics centers: "map who these f---ers are... and knock them out." 🧵

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.

The results were eye-opening.

city-journal.org/article/mellon…

Housed within the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the group's conception of academic freedom seems to have little to do with free speech.

Here's a meeting where one fellow says that UPenn punishing Amy Wax for her speech was academic freedom in practice.

The group reserves special ire for the new civics centers, like the UF's Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education.

Here's its president, Isaac Kamola, again saying he wants to run projects that will boost their "political cost" and decrease their "legitimacy."

Kamola specifically argues that, through "right-wing" centers, donors pull a sneaky trick, funding new faculty for a limited time, only to later leave universities to foot the bill.

This is an especially ironic complaint, given the practices of Kamola's own funder...

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. wsj.com/opinion/the-me…

In fact, the center appears to be part of a larger Mellon project to fight reform efforts.

"This is not public, so don’t share this anywhere, please... They’ve gotten a budget that looks like it may be $10 million to create a new organization that would do rapid response."

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.

city-journal.org/article/mellon…