Dear Commons Community,
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning describing the Manhattan Institute and how it has influenced higher education policy. It currently is a main mover in developing Trump’s conservative agenda on colleges and universities. I have followed the Manhattan Institute for decades and have known several of its members, it is totally right-of-center in its focus and has increased its influence at many levels. Below is an excerpt from The Chronicle article.
Well worth a read.
Tony
———————————————————-
In the spring of 2023, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion essay by John D. Sailer, who was then a fellow at the National Association of Scholars. Based on documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Sailer detailed how a search committee from the Texas Tech University biology department had vetted candidates for a faculty position. One was dinged for advocating a race-neutral approach to teaching; another was praised for reciting a “land acknowledgement” before their job interview. What Sailer found confirmed what he and other critics of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts had long suspected, Sailer wrote: Diversity statements function as ideological litmus tests.
“DEI connotes a set of highly contestable social and political views,” wrote Sailer. “Requiring faculty to catalog their commitment to those views necessarily blackballs anybody who dissents from an orthodoxy that has nothing to do with scientific competence.”
The next day, Texas Tech announced that it would stop using diversity statements in faculty hiring. A short time later the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, sent a letter to the state’s public colleges condemning any hiring practices that consider candidates for reasons other than merit.
For Sailer, the Texas Tech investigation was a turning point in his career. “Moving on to Manhattan Institute was kind of a logical next step,” he said.
The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank founded in the late ’70s to improve “great American cities,” has emerged in recent years as a formidable influence on higher education. The think tank has crafted model legislation to remake colleges and universities as race-blind institutions, fueled the campaign to oust Claudine Gay as president of Harvard, and turned City Journal, its quarterly magazine, into a platform for attacking diversity programs, grade inflation, and university presidents’ capitulation to the demands of left-leaning students and faculty. It has found in Trump administration officials and red-state lawmakers a battalion of allies who share the view that higher education has strayed from its truth-focused mission.
In the months leading up to Trump’s second inauguration, Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, met with members of the administration to plan how the government could rein in DEI by threatening federal funding. On his second day in office, Trump signed two executive orders banning DEI-related contracts and spending across the government.
In July 2025, the institute published the “Manhattan Statement on Higher Education,” which advocates a “contract” between the Trump administration and the sector that demands colleges “cease their direct participation in social and political activism.” The contract would also require colleges seeking federal funding to eliminate DEI programs, uphold “civil discourse” by punishing protesters, and publish student-admissions data.
Linda McMahon, secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, praised the Manhattan Statement on social media, congratulating Rufo and the Manhattan Institute “for envisioning a compelling road map to restore integrity and rigor to the American academy!”
“Clearly, we have the ears of some important people who are involved in making decisions about higher education,” Sailer, now director of higher-education policy at the institute, said. His approach to influencing policy through investigations has created a distinct brand of think-tank activism. “Legitimate scoops move the needle more than anything,” he said.
The higher-education team comprises just six people. Fellows and researchers pursue their own investigations, often spurred by tips from professors or their own curiosity. Sailer alone has filed hundreds of records requests to colleges and organizations across the country. Earlier this month, he posted voice recordings of the director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom describing his goal of “undermining and discrediting the legitimacy” of conservative-backed civic centers. Sailer obtained the audio through a records request targeting the emails of the center’s fellows.
“We do not just want to produce white papers,” Sailer said. “When we can get an institution to reverse course on a policy that we think is really bad and that we’ve exposed, that’s a good day.”
Over the last two months, Sailer and his colleagues have set their sights on sinking the candidacy of Stuart R. Bell as the next president of the University of Florida. Florida is ground zero for what the Manhattan Institute calls the “reform movement”: an effort to move colleges away from racial and social-justice activism and toward a race-blind vision of higher education. Under its Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, state lawmakers made the dismantling of diversity programs a major policy goal in the state.
To the institute, Bell’s nomination is doubly offensive because it was only a year ago that Rufo led a campaign to torpedo the candidacy of Santa J. Ono, the University of Michigan’s former president, to lead Florida. Atop Rufo’s bill of indictment: Ono’s diversity policies.
As president of the University of Alabama, Bell supported a DEI plan to increase Black and Latino enrollment, recruit a diverse faculty, and reckon with the university’s violent racist past. Sailer was one of the first conservatives to publicly oppose Bell’s candidacy. In social-media posts and commentary in the Wall Street Journal, Manhattan Institute activists argued that Bell’s efforts at Alabama led to discrimination against white people, violated state law over building renaming, and pushed an “ideology” onto the campus that everyone must work to undo racism.
We do not just want to produce white papers. When we can get an institution to reverse course on a policy that we think is really bad and that we’ve exposed, that’s a good day.
“Higher-education reform is not a one-time event. It is a long-term project that requires consistent leadership,” Sailer said. “And so the University [of Florida] is saying that our choice for president has previously embraced something that is antithetical to higher education — that should be disqualifying.”
Governor DeSantis has endorsed Bell, and Florida’s Board of Trustees sent his nomination to the state board earlier this month. A July 1 Board of Governors meeting will confirm whether the scrappy think tank will again be successful in leading the charge to topple a presidential candidate at one of the nation’s leading public research universities.
The Manhattan Institute was founded in 1978 as the International Center for Economic Policy Studies, before later changing its name. In the first issue of its The Manhattan Report newsletter, the institute’s scholars wrote about topics such as rent delinquency in New York City and why “urban decay feeds off public assistance.”
In the ’80s during the Reagan administration, it quickly found its niche arguing against welfare programs. In 1984, Charles Murray, then a senior fellow at the institute, published Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980. Murray argued that Black and poor families’ dependency on welfare was connected to “crime, illegitimacy, school dropout, and non-work,” and that such aid programs should be stopped.
Democrats described Murray’s assertions as “anti-family,” and scholars questioned its validity. The New York Times editorial page dubbed Losing Ground the “budget-cutters’ bible,” writing in 1985 that Murray’s “proposition may be as deeply flawed as it is startling, unlikely to survive scrutiny.”
But in 1996, Congress passed a welfare-reform act, making federal assistance temporary, rather than long term. “It turns out that ideas have consequences in an even more profound sense than Murray’s splendid book imagined,” Myron Magnet, then City Journal’s editor, wrote in 2005 in an article titled “Ending Welfare as We Knew It.”
For much of the Manhattan Institute’s history, its focus on education primarily revolved around secondary school — pushing school-voucher programs, “test-based” accountability, and charter schools. While the institute has long been critical of certain aspects of higher education, including the City University of New York’s diversity efforts, its white papers and commentary gained traction as the sector became more polarized over race and diversity after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“Higher ed is an important part of economic flourishing and of people bettering themselves,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the institute. “The crisis in higher ed has been thrust to the forefront of our national political debates.”
In 2021, Sailer was a debate coach at The King’s College, a now-closed Christian liberal-arts institution in New York City. (The conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza is a former president.)
That year, Sailer’s debate team attended the United States Universities Debate Championship, which was held over Zoom due to the pandemic. The tournament plunged into controversy when the Morehouse College debate team withdrew, alleging that other participants had engaged in racist mockery.
Tournament organizers released a statement taking “full responsibility for the anti-Blackness and racism that transpired.” The remainder of the debates were canceled. Instead, organizers hosted a forum on anti-Blackness.
“There was no discussion about the merits of these claims. There was just kind of the assertion that this was in fact the case,” Sailer recalled. “Anyone who disagreed was sort of presumed to be racist.”
Sailer believes a similar dynamic was pervasive at colleges in those years. “Something was culminating in higher education that was antithetical to the idea that what we should be doing here is putting ideas to the test, following ideas to their conclusion, and debating them,” he said. “It became very clear to me that there was a broken epistemology that had taken hold in some pockets of our institutions that just does not match those foundational principles of intellectual life.” Alarm at the deterioration of academic life, Sailer said, is “definitely a part of why I decided to move into higher-ed policy.”
In the years following 2020, college leaders spoke explicitly, some for the first time, about racial and social injustice. Colleges built and expanded their DEI offices and, in some instances, implemented diversity plans with the goal of reflecting the racial demographics of their states.
“I see that as an inevitable and proper thing,” Sailer said about the goal of a racially diverse campus. But the way colleges pursued that goal, he argued, created an “infrastructure” that has mandated faculty and students to place social justice at the center of curriculum, hiring, and university operations.
Rufo, a former documentary filmmaker who joined the Manhattan Institute in 2019, has blamed diversity efforts in Hollywood for a lack of opportunities for straight white men. Shapiro had been hired as a faculty member at Georgetown University’s law school but never actually started in the position. He was investigated by the university over a social-media post in which he stated his displeasure at the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, calling her a “lesser Black woman” in comparison to his preferred pick, the federal judge Sri Srinivasan. Though Shapiro was reinstated by Georgetown after a monthslong investigation, he instead resigned from the university and joined the Manhattan Institute in 2022.
“We seek out policy entrepreneurs and activists who are rigorous, intellectually independent, and focused on achieving real-world results,” Jesse Arm, the institute’s vice president for external affairs, said in an email to The Chronicle. “Whether identifying problems or advancing solutions, our objective is the same as it has always been: to generate ideas that improve American life and help institutions perform at their highest level.”
Compared to other influential conservative think tanks, the Manhattan Institute is operating with a fraction of the staff and funding. In 2024, the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, had a budget of $134 million and more than 500 people on its staff, according to a recent tax filing. The Manhattan Institute, by comparison, brought in $25 million and employed 103 staffers.
The institute’s growing clout in higher education coincided with the rise of Florida’s Governor DeSantis, who famously vowed that his state is where “woke goes to die.” In 2021, DeSantis announced the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, known as STOP W.O.K.E. The legislation restricted what professors can teach or say about race in the classroom.
The announcement included a testimonial from Rufo: “Governor Ron DeSantis is not only protecting all of the employees and students in the State of Florida. He is providing a model for every state in the United States of America. Critical Race Theory is wrong; it offers nothing to improve the lives of anyone of any racial background.” A federal judge blocked the act from being enforced in 2022, saying that the legislation bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints.
In the following years, Manhattan Institute scholars deepened their relationships with the DeSantis administration and their influence in the state. DeSantis appointed Rufo to the board of the New College of Florida (he stepped down in 2025). Shapiro now serves on the board of Florida Polytechnic University.
“It’s not like we decided all of a sudden we’re going to focus on Florida higher ed,” said Shapiro. “But that’s where opportunities presented themselves, and that’s where lawmakers were amenable to hearing from us.”
In 2023, Shapiro and Rufo together drafted model legislation for state lawmakers that would abolish DEI offices, eliminate DEI positions, and end mandatory diversity training and the use of diversity statements. The legislation also sought to ban any effort to promote as the “official position” of the university concepts including “unconscious or implicit bias,” “intersectionality,” “transgender ideology,” “antiracism,” “systemic oppression,” or any “related formulation” of such topics.
“The purpose of this policy document is to ensure that public universities succeed in their mission to promote the search for truth and knowledge while maintaining academic freedom and integrity, without being transformed into factories of ideological conformity,” the model legislation read. “To this end, the DEI bureaucracies within public universities must be dismantled.”
The model legislation faced immediate criticism from proponents of diversity efforts, who argued that it was too broad and a transparent act of viewpoint discrimination.
“This just seems like they’re banning concepts that they do not like,” said Francisca D. Fajana, senior counsel at LatinoJustice, a civil-rights organization that defends federal funding for Hispanic-serving institutions, which the Manhattan Institute has campaigned against. “What is wrong with intersectionality? Why is that a DEI concept that should be unlawful? There are viewpoints that they disagree with, and so they want states that are aligned with their worldview to ban those viewpoints.”
In the 2023 legislative cycle, a dozen states introduced legislation with near-identical language to the Manhattan Institute’s model legislation. Over the next three years, Republicans introduced over 150 anti-DEI bills that restricted or banned colleges and universities from operating DEI offices, employing DEI officers, and using public funding for diversity-related programs, among other restrictions — 32 bills have been signed into law, according to a Chronicle tracker.
Lawmakers have also passed laws in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Florida over the last two years that restrict how faculty teach about “divisive concepts” and ban “race and gender ideology.” The legislation has resulted in extensive course reviews across numerous colleges.
In several states, faculty members have described a “chilling effect” and alleged censorship as colleges rush to implement new guidance and policies in response to the laws. At Texas Tech University, a new policy bans graduate students from writing their theses or dissertations on sexual orientation or gender identity, despite no state law requiring the university to do so.
In its 2023 model legislation, the Manhattan Institute wrote that it should not be construed to affect “academic course instruction, research and creative works by the institution’s students, faculty, or other research personnel.” In the Manhattan Institute’s 2026 model legislation to “Reform Faculty Accountability in Higher Education,” the think tank calls for state lawmakers to expand oversight into public colleges and the “creation of core curricula.”
As Sailer put it, “This is going to be where a lot of the future battles over the shape of higher education are going to be.”
