The Rebel Campus Boosters Rising Up Against Wokeness on Campus

Alarmed by academia’s dominant ideological ethos of social justice activism – particularly the holy trinity of race, sex, and gender – more than two dozen dissident groups have emerged seeking to rebalance the culture at leading public and private universities across the country, including Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, Williams, the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia. 

They are expected to gain traction with Donald Trump back in the White House.

The dissident alumni organizations are not shoestring operations, but well-honed machines, some raising several hundred thousand dollars a year; a number of them have hired executive directors, professional staff, or consultants. This loose coalition of local chapters has also developed into a national movement with its own umbrella group, the Alumni Free Speech Alliance. 

Drawing on alumni resources and connections, the dissidents have curated email lists totaling thousands of recipients, diverted financial contributions from longtime university donors, attracted financial support from foundations, organized speaker series and public events, and generated critical reports and investigative articles, especially regarding policies advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. They have invited prominent conservative and contrarian thinkers such as George Will, Nadine Strossen, Jonathan Haidt, Douglas Murray, and Heather Mac Donald to deliver on-campus talks.

The Virginia Military Institute alumni group, The Cadet Foundation, is the publisher of the independent student newspaper, The Cadet, and other chapters function as aggregators, muckrakers, and news services. The Jefferson Council,the University of Virginia alumni chapter, produces original articles almost daily of consistently high informational and entertainment value, and mostly written by a retired news editor and author. 

“When you get down to it, these groups are news organizations, in a sense,” said Tom Rideout, a 1963 graduate of Washington & Lee University and a former American Banking Association president who co-founded one of the first alumni free speech associations, The Generals Redoubt, in response to the university’s move in 2018 to distance itself from its namesakes and their ties to slavery. “Essentially we’re in the communications business. Our job is to gather intelligence and distribute intelligence to supporters.”

It’s not possible to isolate the precise influence of these alumni from parallel pressure applied by Republican lawmakers, conservative trustees, and heterodox faculty, but college donations dipped nationwide last year in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent campus protests; donations at Harvard, Columbia, and Penn fell dramatically during this time amid rising alumni alarm. 

For their part, the dissident alumni say they have helped bring about significant political gains, including: 

• The resignation of Cornell president Martha Pollack, who was accused of prioritizing “DEI groupthink” that resulted in unruly campus protests and student harassment, prompting an investigation by the U.S. Education Department; 
• Princeton’s president admonishing first-year students at freshman orientation last fall that it’s not the university’s job to “validate your opinions”;
• The University of Virginia suspending student-led campus tours that angry alumni said caricatured the legacy of Thomas Jefferson as nothing but slavery, rape, and theft of Indigenous land; 
• The Virginia Press Association awarding its “top honor” to the Virginia Military Academy student newspaper, which is published by dissident alumni, for the student-journalists’ coverage of DEI controversies on campus. 

Their operating expenses go to staff salaries, marketing expenses, speaker fees, and events, which can get disruptive. In some cases, the alumni chapters pay for their speakers’ private security or reimburse the university for campus security. UVA billed the Jefferson Council $7,847 for Abigail Shrier’s appearance in 2023 to discuss her book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” Over two years, the Jefferson Council was billed about $47,000 for security expenses in connection with controversial speakers. 

The newly arisen alumni free speech associations are just one facet of a major realignment in academia that signals that a half-century era of unchallenged progressive intellectual dominance may be coming to an end. Major university systems in red states have already ended DEI policies in hiring and scholarship, and more than 120 universities have adopted policies of institutional neutrality – the idea that the university exists to foster debate and criticism, not to take sides on public controversies.

Other organizations devoted to protecting academic freedom and viewpoint diversity – such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Heterodox Academy, and the Academic Freedom Alliance – have arisen to challenge the narrow academic consensus on social and political questions. 

In parallel, heterodox faculty at leading universities have formed campus chapters, such as the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom, and kindred faculty groups at Yale, MIT, Columbia, and Duke. Last year, the University of Chicago announced an anonymous grant of $100 million to promote free speech values at the Chicago Forum for Free Speech and Expression. The Chicago Forum develops student orientation programming, supports research in academic freedom, and establishes fellowship programs for visiting scholars. 

Over the same period, conservative donors, legislators, and trustees have launched more than a dozen academic civics centers that are reviving classical liberal education, rediscovering the Great Books, and rejecting what they perceive as the vilification of Western Civilization. These well-funded programs operate autonomously like law schools or engineering schools, with their own deans, Ph.D. programs, and sometimes dedicated buildings. 

Trump's Election a Boost

Trump’s election is expected to accelerate the reforms, particularly with his threat to cut federal funding to institutions that give weight to the racial identity and gender identity of students and faculty in admissions, hiring, teaching, and research. 

In a January essay on the Princetonians for Free Speech site, group co-founder and current secretary and general counsel Edward Yingling, a former American Banking Association president, predicted that 2025 will be a breakthrough year for free speech on campus. The major precipitating event of this predicted turnaround, Yingling wrote, was the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 that led to unruly campus protests and encampments and the resignations of Ivy League presidents at Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, all of which now have alumni free speech association chapters. 

Some observers warn the anti-woke pushback will lead to an overcorrection. The legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group, predicted, according to the New York Times, the likelihood of increased attacks on the free speech rights of progressive students and professors, including investigations, punishment, and terminations. A recent weekend essay in the Wall Street Journal issued a similar warning, saying that the ravages of wokeness and cancel culture will come in the form of political payback: “They/them who sow the censorious winds should be prepared to one day reap the whirlwind.”

These transformations point to a looming question about the future prospects for the alumni free speech alliance chapters: Will these dissident alumni organizations be able to sustain momentum and continue attracting donations when it starts looking like wokeness is moribund and DEI is DOA? 

When asked this question, not a single chapter representative hesitated to say that the fight will continue for years, possibly until the current generation of faculty and DEI hires reaches retirement age and can be replaced with a more balanced professoriate.

Carl Neuss, a California real-estate developer who co-founded the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, likened academia to a beautiful sailing ship infested with rats who are about to face an exterminator. 

“It’ll be a battle royale,” Neuss said. “It’ll be a generation-long effort to get some balance back in the universities. They’re never going to reform themselves – the only way for it to occur is from outside pressure.”

James Bacon, a co-founder of The Jefferson Council and the chapter’s former executive director, expressed similar sentiments, characterizing the prevailing DEI value system among students, faculty, and administrators as “an entrenched orthodoxy.” 

“It’s going to be a battle of a generation before we bring about substantial change,” Bacon said. “It’s going to be trench warfare, like the Battle of Verdun, fighting over inches.”

Retired federal prosecutor John Bruce, a board member of the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill’s alumni free speech association, concurs. “We see ourselves as permanent,” Bruce said. “There is a danger that people will think that the battle has been won. But the Left is relentless.”

Although the formal missions of these alumni chapters include specific proposals to promote free speech and viewpoint diversity, their ambitions are much broader: to change the intellectual climate of academia, revive classical liberal education, and curb the social justice activism that has pervaded academia for years. 

Some of the dissident groups – including chapters at UVA, Washington & Lee, Cornell, and Princeton – have been active in opposing campus efforts to  rename buildings and remove statues, plaques, and commemorations that are said to glamorize white supremacy or make African American students feel excluded. 

The Washington & Lee University alumni who formed The Generals Redoubt include among their stated goals the re-establishment of public prayer. The group defends the character of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and promotes a book, “Un-Cancel Robert E. Lee: An Open Letter to The Trustees of Washington and Lee University,” written by member Gib Kerr and published by the conservative imprint, Bombardier Books.

These alumni were furious that W&L removed Lee’s name from the campus chapel, sealed off Lee’s recumbent statue from public view, and removed the likenesses of George Washington and Robert E. Lee from diplomas awarded to graduating students. 

The Generals Redoubt is one of the most successful alumni chapters, raising $2 million in each of the past two years, according to the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer database, and spending $1 million to purchase a historic property to serve as the organization’s headquarters and venue site. 

Among those that have taken on the cause of historic preservation, The Jefferson Council’s formal mission involves preserving “the beauty of The Lawn” – the terraced greensward and courtyard at the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s academic village that is listed on the Virginia Historic Register, the National Historic Register and among the UNESCO World Heritage Sites – from political signs that the chapter deems vulgar and offensive. 

The Jefferson Council was provoked in 2020 by a student occupant of one of the storied 19^th-century rooms on The Lawn who posted on the door: “Fuck UVA,” followed by a string of accusations: “UVA operating cost, KKKops, genocide, slavery, disability, Black+Brown life.” 

Noting that the profanity was “disheartening,” the university nevertheless supported the student’s free speech rights in this instance. UVA’s decision was publicly praised by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, “illustrating why UVA is one of the relatively few institutions in the country to earn FIRE’s highest, ‘green light’ rating.”

The Jefferson Council was galvanized by UVA’s “Racial Equity Task Force” report in 2020 that recommended $950 million in DEI-related and antiracist-oriented investments, leading to the removal of a statue of George Rogers Clark (a subjugator of indigenous tribes), the renaming of the main campus library, and the promised – but as-of-yet not realized – “contextualization” of the Thomas Jefferson statue in front of the iconic Rotunda, designed by Jefferson himself and modeled on the Roman Pantheon. 

The Jefferson Council has filed more than 200 Freedom of Information Act requests to pry loose details on a range of issues, including details about UVA’s decision-making on recent name changes of campus buildings and past and potential yet-unannounced future statue removals. A faculty petition has declared The Jefferson Council to pose a threat to academic freedom. 

“We are widely detested,” said Bacon, one of the co-founders and principal writers for The Jefferson Council.

In a 2023 New York Times article about the alumni group, UVA President James Ryan expressed his doubts about The Jefferson Council’s real motives: “Whether this is an effort to focus on the aspects of D.E.I. that seem to threaten academic freedom and push toward ideological conformity, or whether it’s an effort to turn back the clock to 1965 – it’s hard to know.” 

Despite the official snub – or perhaps because of it – The Jefferson Council raised a healthy $260,000 in 2023, down from $557,044 the previous year. The group communicates with 3,200 members and has about 850 active donors, said co-founder Thomas Neale, a corporate finance professional who is also chairman of the national Alumni Free Speech Alliance. 

What rankles Neale and other alumni is what they see as a blatant double standard that trumpets free speech rights for woke obscenities on a UNESCO World Heritage site but cites the harms of misgendering and microaggressions when the insult goes the other way.

The dissident alumni have established a base of support among like-minded students and faculty on their respective campuses, but they have also made enemies along the way. 

Robert Morris Jr., the founder and president of VMI’s dissident alumni group, The Cadet Foundation, has been banned for life from the university’s official alumni association in connection with accessing the alumni email database to recruit alumni to the dissident group, and a number of other alumni were handed 10-year suspensions for their involvement. 

Bert Ellis, a University of Virginia trustee and co-founder of The Jefferson Council, was censured by UVA’s Faculty Senate for allegedly planning to vandalize the student’s “Fuck UVA” sign; Ellis was also the target of an unsuccessful effort by Democrats in the Virginia statehouse to block his appointment to UVA’s board of visitors. 

A 'Monster List' of Supporters

According to The Cornell Daily Sun, then-President Martha Pollack said in 2023 – a year before she was forced to resign – that it was “incredibly frustrating” that groups like the Cornell Free Speech Alliance denounce DEI “in the guise” of defending free speech. 

The Cornell group has proven to be one of the most active and effective chapters, one born out of a university fundraising appeal gone bad. 

In 2019, Cornell officials courted Neuss, a 1976 engineering grad and successful real-estate tycoon, with an invitation to make a substantial gift – “north of $1 million,” in Neuss’s words – in exchange for a naming opportunity involving a university building, possibly a library or a laboratory. Neuss had heard rumors about intolerance and censorship on campus and delayed cutting the check as he mulled his options. In a bid to appease his concerns, university officials introduced him to political moderates on the faculty. After hearing their testimonies, Neuss resolved to use his donations to create the Cornell Free Speech Alliance in 2021.

“What he learned from these faculty members was astonishing,” the Cornell Alliance memorialized in one of its numerous reports. “They told him that they felt sidelined and humiliated by the diversity training they were required to attend and were perpetually afraid they would say something factual but impolitic that could negatively impact their job.”

The alumni organization began compiling an email distribution from various sources – web searches, references, word of mouth, unsolicited inquiries – and now communicates regularly with 23,000 regular readers and subscribers. Like other alumni groups, Cornell tapped into the university’s official alumni association contacts list – extracting thousands of emails – before Cornell shut down unlimited access. The Cornell Free Speech Alliance now disseminates news updates and other information reporting on the Cornell administration and exposing practices the group considers abusive or even illegal.

“This is one thing that absolutely freaks them out,” Neuss said. “We have compiled this monster email list of Cornell alumni, donors, trustees, former trustees, et cetera.”

A report issued in December 2023 lists a number of early achievements: creating a free speech “action plan” for Cornell leadership; media exposure in The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, New York Post, Inside Higher Ed, National Review and RealClearPolitics; and filing an amicus brief with other alumni free speech alliance chapters in a Supreme Court case involving alleged free speech abridgments at Virginia Tech University. 

Neuss said the organization has close to 1,000 donors. As of 2023, the group reported $221,000 in revenue and total assets of $186,000, according to the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer database. It is run by an executive committee of eight Cornell alums and two dozen other volunteers, and paid professionals include an email blast specialist and a PR/communications point person.

One of the culture war controversies that drew the group’s ire was the mysterious disappearance of a bust of Abraham Lincoln that had been displayed at the Rare and Manuscript Collections section of Kroch Library, which houses the university’s Asia Collections and rare books,  manuscripts and other artifacts. A professor learned from a librarian that the bust had been removed because of a “complaint.” The bust was eventually restored after the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, The College Fix, and others drew attention to its disappearance, and concerned alumni flooded the administration with angry letters. 

This was at the height of the so-called racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, prompting Cornell President Pollack to announce what was cast as a series of antiracist actions: a mandatory unit on racism, bias, and equity for all Cornell students; the creation of an Anti-Racism Center to generate antiracism scholarship; and a campus-wide, racism-focused semester, during which “our campus community will focus on issues of racism in the U.S. through relevant readings and discussions.” 

In January 2024, Cornell trustee and donor Jon Lindseth wrote an open letter to Cornell trustees calling for President Pollack’s resignation, enumerating a litany of complaints, starting with Pollack’s “shameful,” milquetoast response to “terrorism and antisemitism,” compared to her swift, decisive action in response to the George Floyd tragedy. 

“A new campus ‘bias reporting system’ fosters a hostile Orwellian environment among neighbors, classmates, and colleagues reporting on one another,” Lindseth wrote. “The elimination of grades and SATs has created a system in which equal outcomes rather than proven merit has become the objective.”

Many of the examples in Lindseth’s letter, such as “whistleblower accounts” from faculty, are attributed to the muckraking work of the Cornell Free Speech Alliance. “Instances are reported of qualified candidates for faculty positions being rejected for their DEI statements alone,” Lindseth wrote. 

“Even Lincoln could be canceled under the present administration,” Lindseth lamented. “This is an absolute disgrace.” 

Less than four months later, Pollack was out. 

Two weeks later, the alumni alliance released a whistleblower report headlined: “Internal Cornell Records Provided To CFSA Show How The University Discriminates Based On Personal Beliefs & Identity Profiles Rather Than Merit.” The report warned that Cornell was illegally disqualifying job candidates based on DEI statements and based on their identity characteristics. 

In August, the group submitted an incriminating 101-page report to Cornell leaders and trustees, noting that Cornell ranks 188^th out of 203 American universities in free expression, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, whose surveys indicate that 88% of Cornell’s students self-censor their speech on campus. 

The report urged Cornell leaders to get out of the business of social justice activism: “Concerns of ‘community,’ ‘belonging,’ ‘microaggressions,’ and related efforts to ‘protect students from harmful ideas’ must be clearly and emphatically subordinated to the essential principles of open inquiry, academic freedom, free expression, and viewpoint diversity.”

“We’re dealing with institutions that are steeped in the oppressor-oppressed ideology,” said Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a national advocacy group that helped spin off the Alumni Free Speech Alliance. “Alumni and donors are now fed up with the idea of being tapped smoothly for money but essentially being pushed aside when they want to talk about the values of the campus.”