A coordinated network of conservative groups is using hidden cameras, mass FOIA requests, and dark money to systematically destroy the careers of university professors who teach about diversity, race, or gender.

"The sense of a kind of creeping right-wing net, in which they're going to catch so-called left-wing faculty who are 'indoctrinating their students,' is widespread. And it has a chilling effect, which is the point."

Joan Scott, professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

A shadowy network of conservative activist groups, backed by Koch-linked dark money, has turned American universities into hunting grounds. Using hidden cameras, thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests, and dozens of websites disguised as local journalism, right-wing organizations are deploying an industrial-scale campaign to identify, shame, and fire professors who teach about diversity, equity, gender identity, or race.

The effort is not scattered or improvised. An investigation by Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism revealed the coordinated architecture behind it: overlapping funders, shared tactics, and a strategy that ties directly into the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 blueprint for remaking the federal government. This is not free speech advocacy. This is a targeted assault on academic inquiry, executed with the efficiency of a private intelligence operation.

The machinery has three primary components. First, Metric Media, a network of nearly 1,200 conservative-leaning websites disguised as local news outlets, flooded universities across all 50 states with public records requests. Between January 2025 and January 2026, Metric filed more than 9,000 FOIA requests nationwide. At least 2,286 of them targeted universities, demanding syllabuses, course materials, and employee communications containing words like "BIPOC," "Indigenous," "Latinx," "diversity," and "queer."

Metric's founder, Brian Timpone, defended the campaign as parental oversight, telling reporters that "parents should know what they are paying professors to teach their children." The problem with this framing is that most college students are adults, and the requests are not coming from parents. They are coming from a partisan media operation that also sells sponsored content to conservative political campaigns and publishes favorable coverage in exchange for payment.

Translation: this is political intimidation wearing the costume of civic journalism.

Second, Accuracy in Media (AIM), a nonprofit that describes itself as a watchdog organization, has been posting selectively edited hidden-camera videos to YouTube since spring 2025. The videos feature undercover operatives posing as students or concerned citizens, extracting admissions from university staff about how they navigate DEI restrictions under state law. AIM has posted nearly 50 such videos targeting institutions in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Utah, Texas, Arizona, and Alabama.

Third, the Oversight Project, an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation, has filed more than 100,000 FOIA requests and nearly 100 lawsuits since 2022. Its president, Mike Howell, has sent dozens of requests specifically targeting university course materials, claiming that syllabuses containing terms like "gender identity" or "white privilege" represent potential violations of Trump administration executive orders.

The human cost is already documented. At Texas A&M University, senior English lecturer Melissa McCoul was secretly filmed during a fall 2025 class on children's literature when she discussed gender identity and expression. A student, later identified as an operative linked to conservative groups, interrupted the lecture and told McCoul that her teaching might be illegal under President Trump's January 2025 executive order asserting there are only two genders. The video went viral after Texas state representative Brian Harrison amplified it on X.

McCoul was fired. Two staff members at Texas A&M were also terminated. The university's president resigned in the fallout. McCoul has since filed a federal wrongful termination lawsuit against the Texas A&M System and its Board of Regents, alleging that administrators knew the student was acting at the direction of outside political actors and chose to sacrifice her rather than defend academic freedom.

AIM's hidden-camera videos alone cost at least three university employees their positions. At NC State University, a staff member was terminated after a covertly recorded video surfaced. At the University of Texas at Arlington, social work academic recruiter Melissa Cruz was let go under similar circumstances. The Department of Justice launched a Title VI investigation into Arizona State University's DEI practices after AIM's videos went viral.

Since 2000, according to a free speech watchdog's tally, nearly 1,700 scholars nationwide have faced sanctions over their speech, with roughly 300 terminated or forced to resign. The pace accelerated dramatically after 2020.

Follow the money and the picture sharpens. Metric Media, Accuracy in Media, the Student Free Press Association (which produces the College Fix news site), and the Oversight Project share overlapping donors. Donors Trust, once described by Mother Jones as the "dark-money ATM of the right," gave hundreds of thousands to each organization. The Charles Koch Foundation funneled more than $1.3 million to the Heritage Foundation, which controlled the Oversight Project until it spun off as an independent entity. The Bradley Impact Fund, a donor-advised fund whose president previously worked at Heritage, distributed additional six-figure sums across the network.

In 2024 alone, these groups collectively received more than $14 million in operating revenue, according to their most recent 990 tax filings. All three are registered as 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which are barred from engaging in election-related political activity. Yet their work functions as an extension of conservative political strategy: delegitimize universities, create controversies that weaken institutional credibility, and build the case for federal intervention in higher education.

The Heritage Foundation's own 2024 annual report boasted that its FOIA requests were so numerous that government workers complained "the volume of requests from Heritage interfered with their ability to do their job." They appear proud of having gummed up the public records system.

The strategy is also working at the policy level. As of the end of 2025, more than half of all college students lived in states with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how campuses can operate. The UNC system directed its 16 universities to stop requiring course credits related to DEI. State legislatures in Florida, Utah, and Texas have enacted laws restricting discussion of gender and race in educational settings.

But the most insidious effect is not legislative. It is psychological. Professor Margaret Kwoka of Ohio State University, an expert on FOIA law, told the Tow Center that she is witnessing "a proliferation of what I think are being characterized as abusive or harassing requests that are more politically motivated." Zach Greenberg, director of faculty legal defense at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, called the right-wing internet ecosystem an "outrage machine" that chills free expression by making faculty think twice about what they say and what they teach.

Bethany Letiecq, a professor at George Mason University, described the practical result: she no longer posts her syllabi online because doing so makes faculty feel like "sitting ducks and targets of this insanity." When Kenneth Marcus, formerly of Trump's Department of Education, was appointed to George Mason's Board of Visitors, Letiecq and two colleagues wrote an op-ed about his political connections. Months later, Marcus's nonprofit, Defending Education, published her syllabus on its website. Defending Education's treasurer was Marcus himself.

The question isn't whether academic freedom is under attack. The question is how many more careers need to be destroyed before universities have the backbone to push back.