When you pull back the curtain on the campaign to bring intellectual diversity to higher education, you see one person managing a machine funded by a network of major right-wing foundations.

The model language for the Academic Bill of Rights is the creation of conservative activist David Horowitz, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Horowitz founded the CSPC in 1988, at the same time he launched Heterodoxy, a tabloid attacking liberal academics. Now, the group puts out FrontPageMag.com and is also associated with the Individual Rights Foundation, a legal reform group.

According to Transparency in Media, CSPC’s multimillion-dollar annual budget is funded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Richard Scaife Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation, among others. The Bradley and Scaife foundations have supplied nearly $20 million since 1989.

In June 2003, Horowitz founded Students for Academic Freedom, which is based in Washington, D.C., and run by the former executive director of Accuracy in Academia (a right-wing watchdog group that encourages students to monitor and write up their professors). SAF provides the national organizing base for both the Academic and Student Bills of Rights. The group’s self-proclaimed mission is to restore intellectual diversity to campus life and to ensure that universities adopt the Academic Bill of Rights as official policy. It claims more than 150 campus chapters, has a downloadable SAF handbook on its Web site (www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org), and also has an extensive online vehicle where students can file their complaints of professorial bias and abuse.

Through its Web site, SAF also distributes the booklet “Unpatriotic University,” published by CSPC and described as “a wealth of information about the bias in hiring, the anti-American rhetoric and the shutting out of conservative points of view both in classrooms and on speakers’ platforms.”

Although it may be tempting to view groups like SAF and CSPC as fringe expressions of the diversity represented in this great country, their link to another organization suggests a larger purpose.

In August 2003, Horowitz was a featured speaker at a breakfast plenary session of the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is a public policy organization whose membership comprises about 2,400 state legislators who join as individuals. It keeps a low profile and while the party affiliation of all of its officers who are elected officials is Republican, its membership list is secret.

ALEC’s primary activities are holding an annual meeting, and developing model legislation and lobbying to get it introduced in state legislatures. At these meetings, its members learn about issues and network with like-minded legislators and corporate sponsors. The sponsors—firms like Enron, American Nuclear Energy Council, Phillip Morris, Coors Brewing Company, to name a few—join with organizations like the National Rifle Association, the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council, not to mention the State Policy Network, to help execute an agenda that would roll back civil rights, challenge government restrictions on pollution, privatize services and reduce government.

As luck would have it, when Horowitz told legislators about the Academic Bill of Rights that summer morning in 2003, Erin O’Neill was in attendance. She was there to learn the lay of the land as she was becoming oriented for a new job as program director of the Public Trust, a coalition based at People for the American Way that follows the activities of right-wing groups. At that point, only the Colorado Legislature had considered the legislation. Immediately after the meeting, ALEC posted the Academic Bill of Rights on its Web site as model legislation. O’Neill has followed its trajectory through 15 states since then.

“This is common with ALEC,” she says. “What they do is take other people’s ideas and get them out to state legislators.” In the 32 years of its existence, ALEC has created an infrastructure that is more effective than any other similar lobbying group. It claims that its member legislators introduce thousands of bills based on the ALEC models. To learn more about ALEC, go to www.publictrustaction.org.

What started as just an idea sparked when Horowitz hooked up with ALEC. Now, the Academic Bill of Rights is burning a path across the United States.