Chris Rufo Demonstrates the Danger of Politicized Education Appointments
What can we do about it?
CW: Transphobic language, coded racism.1
Now, no one can eat his cake, and have it, too, and it is late in the day to attempt to penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality, a language without which the nation would be even more whipped than it is.
-James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” (1979)
To get universal school choice, you have to operate from the premise of universal school distrust.
-Chris Rufo, “Laying Siege to the Institutions” (Hillsdale College, 2022)
SC Governor Henry McMaster nominated Smith for appointment to the state Higher Education Commission, along with Mick Zais, South Carolina’s former Superintendent of Education.
Zais’ claim to fame during his tenure in SC was when he rejected $140 million in federal education funds, during a recession, which could have avoided the furloughs and layoffs of thousands of public school teachers, while also supporting an expansion of tax credit scholarships for private schools. Very briefly, after Betsy DeVos— another unqualified political appointee bent on “disrupting” the institution rather than improving it— resigned following the Jan. 6 insurrection, Zais became the acting U.S. Secretary of Education. He endorsed current SC Superintendent of Education and former Palmetto Promise Institute leader Ellen Weaver (who also got her only education-related experience as a political appointee)— who has done nothing of note since taking office, other than attending the M4L conference and potentially violating her employees’ constitutional rights. I guess think tankers have to stick together.
Understandably, these kinds of appointments generally fly under the radar. Smith’s and Zais’ nominations only became news at the end of last session when they were (temporarily) blocked by a Democratic filibuster. Few knew who Weaver— a powerful behind-the-scenes player in school privatization policy— was until she ran for state office.
But recent developments in Florida show how important it is to get involved before public appointments are confirmed, at which point appointees who don’t answer to voters may have carte blanche to make sweeping and destructive changes to the way state-funded colleges and universities, and other public educational institutions, function.
Who is Chris Rufo?
A few years ago, Rufo was a documentary filmmaker, directing programs for PBS like America Lost.2
Then, around 2021, Rufo seems to have rebranded himself as a “disruptor” (which is kind of like the chaotic evil version of an Instagram influencer) and a culture warrior. Like most culture warriors, his main argument for supporting him was that other culture warriors— “woke Leftists,” in his framing— are bad and scary, or at least stupid and hopelessly naïve. Suddenly, his foundation saw an increase, on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars in “untraceable” dark money, likely from rightwing groups. He moved from being a contributor to being a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, yet another of the conservative think tanks that seem to be the only possible source for appointed public officials3. Voilà! A star is born.
Last January, as part of his campaign to prove he is the most anti- “woke” presidential candidate in America, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Rufo to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees. The press release on the appointment claimed,
In recent years, Rufo has led the fight against critical race theory in American institutions. Rufo’s research and activism inspired a presidential order and legislation in fifteen states, where he has worked closely with conservative governors and lawmakers to craft successful public policy. Rufo has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Rufo earned his bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a master’s degree from Harvard University.
The first part of that is pretty accurate and important information, give or take the meaning of “critical race theory”: Rufo is the self-proclaimed mastermind behind the anti- “CRT” movement, bragging on Twitter (or whatever it’s called now) on March 15, 2021, that he planned to use the term Critical Race Theory to refer to pretty much anything the far right doesn’t like:
We have successfully frozen their brand—"critical race theory"—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.
That phrase brand category is an important window into the way Rufo seems to operate: this isn’t about revealing some underlying truth or teasing out intellectual complexities. This is about giving consumers a choice between opposing “brands”: Rufo’s “conservative” “disruption” or the vague menace of the “woke Left”. Which customers do you suppose might buy the (white) nationalist alternative to 1968-style Civil Rights activism Rufo is selling?
Rufo has helped to make “CRT”— a specific area of legal studies that generally studies how systemic (rather than individual) racism both impacts law and society, and is shaped by law—into a catchall buzzword that encompasses what he calls “cultural insanities”— which turn out to be things like calling people the pronouns they ask you to call them, teaching that systemic racism (redlining, for example) is real, or generally believing in anything but the so-called “classical” approach to education Rufo espouses (more on that in a future piece).
In August 2020, Rufo tweeted that his goal was to convince the Trump administration to pass “an executive order abolishing critical race theory in the federal government.” In September 2020, the administration did just that, with a presidential executive order containing language that has been adapted into “anti-woke” education laws across the country, including a proviso that the state “Freedom Caucus” has used to sue districts and support the banning of books in my state, South Carolina.
The second part of DeSantis’ statement plays a bit more loosely with the facts. Rufo has repeatedly claimed he earned a masters degree from “Harvard,” but as New Republic reported, he actually got a “Master of Liberal Arts in Government” at the Harvard Extension school. As the article explains,
Harvard Extension School, in a nutshell, is part of the renowned institution, but it is not Harvard as most people know it (a Harvard student once joked that it’s the “back door” to Harvard). The school describes itself as an “open-enrollment institution prioritizing access, equity, and transparency.” Eligibility for the school is, according to its website, “largely based on your performance in up to three requisite Extension degree courses, depending on your field, that you must complete with distinction.” High school grades and SAT and ACT scores aren’t required at the institution.
Harvard College also doesn’t actually accept credits earned at the Harvard Extension School. Harvard Extension’s website currently describes Rufo’s program as requiring 11 out of 12 courses to be taken online, with a few weekends or weeks on campus. Students can complete either a “capstone” project or a more traditional thesis.
This, in itself doesn’t matter much, but it speaks to the kind of creative license with the truth which Rufo has taken in developing his “narrative,” and suggests that while presenting himself as an alternative to the “bureaucratic” class which he claims has “seized the institutions,” he is more interested in becoming part of that class than in undoing it. (This is very similar to Oran Smith presenting himself as a K-12 educational expert despite having no experience or training in that arena, or SC Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver touting a Master’s degree from Bob Jones University which she seems to have obtained in a nearly-impossibly short amount of time. Evidently, the steps to being a “think tank” success are to make up and/ or exaggerate your credentials, find a dark money donor— preferably while accusing everyone else of cashing checks from someone like George Soros— and profit.)
What is Rufo trying to accomplish?
Rufo’s agenda is very clear. In April 2022, he gave an address, called “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” at the private religious college Hillsdale. The college is very popular with the anti-“woke” political class; the New Yorker reported that “In January, [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis’s chief of staff told National Review that the governor hoped to transform New College of Florida, a public liberal-arts school, into a ‘Hillsdale of the South.’ One of the people involved in implementing the reforms is a dean and vice-president at Hillsdale."
Like Rufo, Hillsdale has reaped the financial benefits of associating itself with conservative culture war politics, as Arnn himself seems to confirm in the New Yorker piece. The piece also describes the school as lacking in racial diversity, describing Arnn’s response to an audit by the state: “Years later, Arnn, testifying before a subcommittee of the Michigan state legislature, said that the officials had been looking for ‘dark ones,’ a phrase that he later apologized for using—kind of”. The piece says the school discourages students from expressing LGBTQ+ identities and forming organizations. The school emphasizes Western literature and has a course called “Western Heritage”.
It is also expanding its “classical” mission into K-12 education. Hillsdale’s charter network includes groups like Ascent Classical Academies, which has recently made inroads into South Carolina. Ascent Classical heavily emphasizes— you guessed it— “the Western tradition”. (I’ll get into this more specifically in a future piece, but this seems to be the main appeal of “classical education”— it allows a focus on the “Western canon” that allows schools to potentially cut out most authors of color, queer authors, and others folks like Rufo don’t like, without explicitly seeming bigoted.)
Early in the address, Rufo says conservatives aren’t going to have the stamina for a revolutionary-socialist-style “long march through the institutions” (a kind of conspiracy theory Johnathan Chait analyzes in more detail here, calling Rufo “a reverse Leninist”). This is a telling rhetorical move, because most of Rufo’s rhetorical fire comes from appropriating the language of Leftist radicals to make anti-Left, reactionary politics sound exciting. (This isn’t original to Rufo; conservative think tank types and Moms 4 Liberty types— for example, those who call every critique a “struggle session”—seem to really like this framing. But it does mean that Rufo’s ultimate agenda is fairly simplistic beneath the language: we’re just going to do what “the Left” does, but make it Opposite Day probably shouldn’t be a compelling policy platform for anyone.)
Instead, in the address, Rufo says conservatives needed to “go to war” and to create a “narrative” as an alternative to the one created in the post-’60s era. He pinpoints 1968— the height of the Civil Rights movement, as well as the year Martin Luther King, Jr., died— as the origin year of “identity politics” and the “idea that the US could be overthrown through cultural revolution,” continuing: “And you had the beginnings of the idea of militant street activists that had sought to, what they believed, use urban guerilla warfare to achieve their political objectives”. (If you heard any right-wing talking points about BLM or “antifa” in the past five years, this will seem very familiar.)
“It’s almost,” he says, “as if we’re living in permanent repeat of some of those ideas.” (Reagan’s communications team would be proud of the way Rufo brings the spectre of BLM “riots,” as anti-“woke” adherents probably imagine them, into the room.) Inasmuch as Rufo’s subset of the right has embraced, wholesale, the Southern Strategy of that era— down to the historical use of slogans like “parent’s rights” to justify segregation and school privatization, and coded racism that would make Lee Atwater nod his head in approval— he seems to be right: the past keeps coming back, and if Rufo gets his way, students at state-funded educational institutions will have only the critical lenses he approves to interpret that past.
In the address, Rufo literally hand-waives (as in, he waives his hands around while he discusses it) the U.S. government intervention in the Civil Rights movement (through programs such as COINTELPRO that involved blackmailing leaders, including trying to push Martin Luther King, Jr., into suicide), saying “And so you saw this leftwing movement burn out over time… And so by the end of it there were just a few dozen angry, disillusioned, disorganized radicals. The FBI had swept up many of them.”4
In Rufo’s narrative, the remaining “washed-up radicals” moved to academia to use “formalized academic work” to push their revolutionary agenda (evidently, it’s only bad if Leftist radicals take over the universities; when Chris Rufo does it, it’s good because reasons). Any idea that might make some white people uncomfortable— like “white privilege,” in Rufo’s narrative— is a holdover from 1968 that is used to “demoralize” and “obfuscate”. Rufo argues “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is just repackaged “Critical Race Theory,” though he provides no real evidence for this in the address, no specific evidence about schools— or any organizations outside of “Walt Disney”— and no citations beyond his own “reporting” (he says “my reporting” A LOT).
Instead, he claims a vast left-wing conspiracy, in which everyone from “elite institutions” of higher learning to “Walmart” to “the federal government” subscribes to a “unitary ideology” in which white people and “white enough” people (like Asians, he says, getting a hearty chuckle from a room that is, if it matches Hillsdale’s overall demographics, full almost exclusively of white people) have to bow down before CRT and essentially beg for forgiveness and “submit to that political ideology” to be “re-accepted back into society”.
Think about how dystopian that is supposed to sound (especially to a room full of white people), and how ridiculous it is to say (especially in a room full of white people, who are currently attending a school where they haven’t been canceled, can listen to Chris Rufo to their hearts’ content while learning about “Western tradition,” and then, if they choose, can one day pretend they attended Harvard college and get a job at a think tank).
If Rufo’s description doesn’t sound like CRT (or anything resembling reality) to you, Rufo has an answer: anyone arguing Critical Race Theory should have a specific meaning that comes out of the context of the people who coined the term and developed the study in law schools is using “postmodernism” to hide the real meanings of their words.
Of course, it’s okay for conservatives to change the meanings of words. Later in the address, Rufo explicitly says, “You have to create your own frame, your own language. And you have to be ruthless and brutal in pursuit of something good.” It’s not postmodern to redefine words as long as you’re conservative, or at least as long as you are Chris Rufo. At the end, Rufo catches himself— he almost says kids should be “protected from ideologies,” but then corrects to “from radical ideologies.”
Essentially, Rufo’s “framing” is fresh and attuned to the information infrastructure of the Internet, but his ideas are old, regressive, and they do go back to at least 1968. He attacks the “idea” (reality) that some groups would necessarily need some kind of additional assistance to be on an equal playing field with others (“equity”) as a way of somehow oppressing the people who don’t need that additional assistance. In Rufo’s narrative, systemic racism isn’t real, because if it were, it would either require a systemic response, or it would make Chris Rufo and others complicit for objecting to a systemic response. Luckily for Rufo, in his narrative it’s okay to (radically!) remake the system to support your own policy agenda, as long as that agenda isn’t the one of the 1968 Civil Rights “radicals”.
In the address, he says that more important than the struggle between “right” and “left” is the struggle between “top” and “bottom”. But, again, Rufo doesn’t seem to really want to destroy higher education bureaucracy, he just wants to be the one at the top. In an interview with the Hungarian Conservative in April of this year, he explicitly said, “There isn’t a shadowy funder that is deploying the [“woke”] ideology, there isn’t a political power that is forcing it from the top down.” Maybe Rufo changed his mind, but I think it’s more likely that he knows his audience, and that to activate fear and conspiratorial thinking, it’s always good to provoke an us-vs-them mentality, even if the truth is that you are less interested in storming the gates than in angling for someone else’s job.
Step two in Rufo’s “siege” (after making up your own meanings for words), involves “parents” (but only “conservative” parents5) to get “involved” in school board meetings. Here again, Rufo has seen a lot of success, as groups of parents and non-parents, whipped into a frenzy by his disinformation campaign about “CRT,” have gotten heavily “involved” in schools and school boards, often in a way that it’s not surprising a “disruptor” like Rufo supports. Sometimes, they have gotten “involved” by advocating for, threatening, or perpetrating violence against school employees6. (Rufo probably deserves some credit for inspiring “ruthless and brutal” “parent’s rights” extremists and making it even harder to be a teacher in this country.)
Rufo’s step three, “decentralization,” is mostly just a big plug for “school choice,” including vouchers. As Rufo says near the end of his address, “I think you want to create the conditions for fundamental, structural change, to appropriate some language… To get universal school choice, you have to operate from the premise of universal school distrust.” In other words, despite polling showing the opposite, we won’t be able to push school vouchers unless we convince Americans that parents generally mistrust schools.
Laying Siege™
Rufo was very transparent about one thing: he has definitely laid siege to the institutions™, and he has used state power to do so. During Rufo’s tenure, the board of the New College voted to abolish Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. And last week, Rufo successfully motioned to dissolve the entire gender studies program, claiming that his goal was to reestablish the values of “classical liberal arts education” in the school (again, more on that in a future piece). We have to “lay siege,” Rufo says, because “these ideologies were not imposed democratically.” Of course, now that he is in power, it’s fine to impose his own ideology without input from the public— again, he’s an appointee, already confirmed, and not subject to votes from the public—because he’s Chris Rufo, and he, better than even the polls he ignores, knows what people really think.
Afterwards, Rufo tweeted, “Ideologues who believe that ‘men can get pregnant’ and ‘women can become men’ should not be running academic departments in public universities. It's not scholarship; it's left-wing nihilism that is antithetical to human reason and the classical liberal arts tradition.” It’s important to notice that having had a few years to wedge open the racist door with his more vague anti-affirmative action talking points, Rufo now feels comfortable with openly anti-trans language (language that is also morally repugnant, feeding dangerous rhetoric against an already increasingly-at-risk group of people, and will hopefully come back to bite him in an inevitable lawsuit if he succeeds in dissolving the gender studies department). The escalation is all part of the plan.
To probably no one’s surprise, the impact of Rufo’s “siege” of New College has been that the school has lost a huge number of faculty members. According to The Guardian,
With the start of the 2023-24 academic year only six weeks away, senior officials at New College of Florida (NCF) made a startling announcement in mid-July: 36 of the small honors college’s approximately 100 full-time teaching positions were vacant [note: this number has increased to 40, according to Inside Higher Education]. The provost, Bradley Thiessen, described the number of faculty openings as “ridiculously high”, and the disclosure was the latest evidence of a brain drain afflicting colleges and universities throughout the Sunshine state.
Inside Higher Ed reports that many courses at New College have been abruptly canceled throughout the summer, leaving students unable to take courses required for their programs, and poor planning has led to significant housing problems for incoming students.
But, of course, this was a huge part of the plan, too, right? In his address at Hillsdale, Rufo said, “There’s some of us, I think me included, that really are just built for offense. And there are some who are built for creating institutions.” What a guy to have on the board of a public institution!
Rufo, predictably, seems to think this situation is amusing: as media coverage in recent days focused on the move to dissolve the gender studies department, he tweeted out,
New College of Florida will be hiring a large cohort of new tenure-track faculty in the following departments. Help me find the best people who are committed to our mission of restoring the classical liberal arts. Drop me recommendations, links, and CVs.
He then shared his email address in the comments (chrisrufo@protonmail.com ) and got in another lazy transphobic dig when asked about the biology department: “Job requirement: must be able to define ‘woman.’ 😅” As someone in the comments of that post aptly pointed out, Rufo is pretty smarmy about job qualifications for someone who once worked for Discovery Institute, an organization that opposed the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools. (Here again, Rufo shares parallels with Oran Smith, who once published a racist, anti-evolution Warren Leamon essay mocking the “Scopes Monkey Trial”.)
The arrogance of folks like Rufo is that they tell you what the game is, then they tell you a more palatable and euphemistic version, and then they wink at you. And if you accuse them of being regressive, racist, or transphobic, they cry foul and find all the “secret” meanings of your words (known only to them) that prove you are the racist. And if you point out that they are using coded language, they will say that ingnoring the plain meanings of their words is “postmodern” (and therefore vaguely, automatically, bad). They can ignore centuries of history but zero in on a single sentence on a book to smear an opponent. It’s an old playbook, and as I wrote about in my second piece about Oran Smith, it’s one that’s explicitly used by self-identified white supremacists like Bob Whitaker, who famously wrote, “Anti-racist is code for anti-white”.
Whittaker’s words are believed to have inspired self-proclaimed white supremacists murderers like Charleston shooter Dylann Roof and Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron. They also pretty neatly encapsulate the “anti-woke” or “anti-CRT” argument.
Is there anything we can do about it?
In Florida, as in South Carolina, gubernatorial appointments like this are subject to approval by the state Senate. If there was an opportunity for Floridians to avoid the damage Rufo has done and is doing, it was probably during the confirmation process, or before. If you live in a state— like South Carolina— on the verge of making similar ideologically- motivated public appointments (like those of Oran Smith and Mick Zais), now might be the time to pick up the phone or open your email and contact your elected officials, and to encourage others to do the same, before it’s too late.
Here’s my version of a teacher supply list:
If you found this useful or interesting, please help me continue this work through a paid subscription, if you’re able.
One reason I’m providing content warnings— something many on the right loudly mocked before swerving into content bans— is that I think this is the appropriate way to deal with controversial/ problematic content: let readers, or, for young children, adults making decisions on their behalf, decide.
I haven’t seen any of the documentaries, but the America Lost website offers this thought, which foreshadows a lot of what Rufo would later say to really make his name: “The crisis of American poverty goes deeper than economics and public policy—it strikes at the very heart of family, community, and spiritual life. The solution is not just to restore the economies of our forgotten cities, but to rebuild our families and communities from the bottom up.” In other words, wrong ideologies, not systemic drivers of inequality, are what is wrong with America.
See: Palmetto Promise Institute, where Oran Smith is a senior fellow and Ellen Weaver was head think tanker for many years, after being appointed by then-Senator John Courson. (I wrote more on Courson’s connections to the Oran Smith/ Richard Quinn world, and his resignations after pleading guilty to misconduct in office charges here.)
Much of Rufo’s argument in the address relies on the conceit that “polling” shows that most “parents” are anti-“woke”. I don’t know what polling he was using, but contemporary polling shows the opposite: parents who currently have children in school tend to be unconcerned with Rufo’s wedge issues, and parents generally don’t support culture war battles or book and content bans in schools. “By wide margins – and regardless of their political affiliation – parents express satisfaction with their children's schools and what is being taught in them” (NPR).
11/7: Updated to add a link to this spreadsheet tracking incidents of educator and librarian censorship and harassment in South Carolina and across the country. Included in the spreadsheet is this map which, puts Rufo’s “march through the institutions” in some real-world context:
