How the SPLC Impoverished Higher Education
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has gained a new share of infamy for its role as an agent provocateur. For at least a decade and perhaps longer, it has paid the principals of racist groups to stage public acts intended to convince Americans that there are large numbers of fellow citizens who revile non-whites. The Justice Department has brought charges against SPLC for the numerous lies it has told to hide this activity. It is unclear, however, whether the charges will stick. The New York Times, for example, has headlined a spry excuse for SPLC: it was just paying “informants” to get the goods on hate groups.
The question for the National Association of Scholars (NAS) is: Does the SPLC’s vile tactic have any bearing on American higher education? We will leave it to others to deal with the moral turpitude, political deception, and illegality entailed by SPLC’s inventive chicanery. Did its mischief reach the college classroom?
Before I answer that, I want to be clear about NAS’s history with SPLC. It’s sparse but important to put on record.
An Uncivil Neighbor
The National Association of Scholars and the SPLC have seldom crossed paths. I kept a wary eye on SPLC because NAS has been a vigorous opponent of racial preferences in higher education and an occasional critic of transgender policies. Other organizations that have taken positions similar to NAS’s were called out by SPLC, which, for example, attacked the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and denounced the group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). NAS filed an amicus brief in support of SFFA in that case, and some of our work was favorably cited by Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion.
We also received a mention from SPLC for a small part we played in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and a mention in 2023 for opposing transgenderism in schools. And back in 2017, SPLC called me out for speaking at a meeting of American Freedom Alliance about illegal immigration. In that case, I published a reply.
There have also been several instances in which SPLC could have targeted its arrows at NAS but chose not to. We praised Moms for Liberty for its positions on school board policies, and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) for its positions on various matters. Moms for Liberty and ADF were both named by SPLC, like the American Freedom Alliance, as “hate groups.” In 2002, I was an expert witness in Meriwether v. Trustees of Shawnee State, in which Professor Meriwether, who had been disciplined by his university for using male pronouns for a male student, was represented by ADF.
Given the vicious attacks SPLC has made on other organizations, I am happy it mostly ignored NAS. We have enough to do without fending off fanatical and ungrounded attacks on our reputation. I assume SPLC ignored us mostly because it preferred to chase targets that loom larger in the public eye. In the academic arena, for example, SPLC went after Turning Point USA, which reaches tens of thousands of undergraduate students, while NAS represents only a few thousand professors.
But we have kept our own watch on the SPLC, as a malign organization that branded other organizations as “hate groups” not because they incited hatred of minorities or anyone else, but because they promoted policy positions that the SPLC disagreed with. SPLC was highly successful in marketing its alarms to the public, to philanthropic foundations, and the business community, all of which were ready to credit SPLC’s declarations without pursuing their own inquiries. Being labeled a “hate group” by SPLC has real consequences, and presumably still does.
The news that SPLC has been persistently stirring up the racism and other forms of hatred it accuses others of perpetrating does not come as a great surprise. The question raised above remains: Does this vile tactic have any bearing on American higher education?
Teaching Intolerance
Indeed, it does—in two important ways. First, SPLC has had many partnerships with universities. An outstanding example is SPLC’s support for the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University, which attempts to document “violent extremism” in the U.S. SPLC also has student chapters on many campuses, fellowships, and well-developed connections to academic organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies.
But leaving these explicit organizational connections aside, the second and more important way in which the SPLC bears on higher education is its cultural shadow. SPLC taught American faculty and students how to mark off and stigmatize people and organizations that they disliked. Where higher education was once committed to the principle—and the practice—of keeping disagreement within the bounds of debate, SPLC pioneered the approach of simply walling off some opinions and some groups as undeserving of having any say whatsoever.
Silencing an opponent rather than listening to what he has to say is, of course, not a brand-new tactic. Mobs have used it since time immemorial. But the SPLC enlarged the idea. First, it identified the remnant of actual hate groups in American life; by surreptitious funding and play-acting, it made these remnants appear more robust; and then it further inflated these largely bogus categories by adding groups whose only transgression was that SPLC disliked their policy proposals.
SPLC may not have invented “cancel culture” on campus, but it perfected the model and showed how much easier it was to demonize an opponent than to debate him.
The educational consequences of this lesson are hard to overestimate. Generations of college and university students have learned to shun debate because even to disagree with an opinion means you have allowed that opinion to be expressed. And to allow a “hateful” opinion to be expressed is to grant a measure of legitimacy.
Groups such as FIRE, Heterodox Academy, and the NAS have fought back against this affirmative bigotry, but it has plainly taken root. When most students declare that they believe it is right and proper to shout down speakers they disagree with, they express themselves as acolytes of SPLC’s creed.
Does this give SPLC too much credit for advancing the tide of ignorance on campus?