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In February of 2025, as college students across the country settled into their spring semesters, administrators at four major public universities in the Midwest received public records requests about their policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which arrived on the same day from a network of sites that looked like local news outlets, asked for all emails employees had sent the previous year containing the words “BIPOC, Indigenous, Latinx, Diversity, and Non-white.”
The requests, from sites owned by a paid partisan network called Metric Media, were part of a strategic, ongoing effort to expose and castigate public universities for teaching with an eye on diversity. Around the same time, a nonprofit called Accuracy in Media began uploading gotcha-style hidden-camera videos to YouTube of school administrators talking about their continued efforts to foreground diversity and equity. The videos sought to highlight the contrast between those efforts and school rules that, in some cases, ban educators from talking about gender and identity. And last summer, the Oversight Project, an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, sent FOIA requests to the North Carolina public university system, seeking all syllabuses that contained any of a long list of terms, including “gender identity,” “racial equity,” “white privilege,” and “restorative justice.”
An investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism has found that these efforts were bankrolled in part by donations from conservative philanthropists and foundations that have received funding from the Koch family. Charles Koch and his late brother, David, poured hundreds of millions into nonprofits and libertarian think tanks that promote education reform, among other things. “It is a fundamental attack on how academic ideas are created,” Isaac Kamola, a professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford and the director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, said. “Those ideas that get produced outside of interference are the ones that the billionaires, the donors, the right-wing political infrastructure are deeply and existentially threatened by.”
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy proposal that has become a lodestar of Trump administration policy, labeled higher education an “establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats.’” As President Trump has called for an end to “radical and wasteful” government DEI programs, conservative groups have leveraged thousands of public records to publish articles and videos designed to shame institutions, professors, and students. The tactics have led to upheaval across public universities and to faculty terminations, and are part of a broader push to limit what can be taught at institutions of higher education. As of the end of 2025, more than half of college and university students lived in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how campuses can operate. And the use of FOIA requests to extract information about course materials is triggering a widespread reexamination of what is considered a public record and what constitutes academic freedom.
“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,” Joan Scott, a professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, whose research focused on gender and academic freedom, told Tow. “And it has a chilling effect, which is the point.”
Last July, a national organization requested all syllabuses for seventy-four courses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that included terms such as “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” “queer,” and “sexuality.” The requester was the Oversight Project, whose mission is to “expose and root out corruption in government, among elected officials, and in our most influential organizations.” The group claims to have filed more than a hundred thousand FOIA requests and nearly a hundred lawsuits since its start, in 2022.
“These things being syllabi, they should be transparently posted on the internet without us having to do it, and so we’re really the forcing function for that,” Mike Howell, the president of the Oversight Project, told Tow. “Give it to the people of America so they can see for themselves as to whether schools are still teaching corrosive DEI concepts, and if it’s unlawful in any way.”
Howell has sent dozens of FOIA requests to various government agencies on behalf of the Heritage Foundation and another of its spin-offs, the Daily Signal, a conservative news website. In July, Howell and the Oversight Project sued the Department of Homeland Security in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking public records about the total number of “illegal aliens removed by the Department” and all voluntary departure data.
At UNC Chapel Hill, the Oversight Project’s request suggested that continuing to teach classes whose written materials contained words such as “sexuality,” “queer,” or “intersectionality” was against the law under executive orders Trump issued in the first days of his second term. “Disclosure of these records will contribute significantly to the public’s understanding of university operations and student-facing programming, particularly considering ongoing public concern regarding institutional compliance with current Executive Orders,” Howell wrote in the request. He added that releasing the materials would “shed light on potential inconsistencies between internal practices and public representations made by officials in a matter of substantial national importance.”
Though presidential executive orders are not laws, the UNC system had already directed the sixteen universities it oversees to stop requiring course credits related to DEI. (The system also issued waivers that allowed courses with titles such as “Feminist Theory” and “Social Work Policy and Restorative Justice” to continue being required for some majors.) Professors worried, however, that publicly releasing their syllabuses could lead to targeting by online groups and potential doxing. They started a petition to keep syllabuses private, arguing that publishing course materials “would endanger students and instructors by inviting political actors to attack the free inquiry on our campuses.”
“The FOIA stuff is yet another way of getting faculty into trouble at various universities and creating an atmosphere in which people are then afraid to teach,” Scott said. “The point is to not only go after individuals, as they’re doing in North Carolina right now. The point is to make an example of a few people so that the rest of us will comply.”
In July of 2025, UNC Chapel Hill sided with professors and denied the Oversight Project’s request. “Course materials, including but not limited to exams, lectures, assignments, and syllabi, are the intellectual property of the preparer and are owned by the preparer as nontraditional work,” the university told Inside Higher Education at the time.
Efforts to use federal and state FOIA laws to “expose” university professors and administrators have been underway for decades, according to Zach Greenberg, the director of faculty legal defense at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonprofit that works to protect freedom of speech on college campuses. “We’ve seen a lot of this occur in the 2010s targeting professors, usually from advocacy groups on specific issues. For example, you would have oil companies target environmentalists for their scholarly records at universities,” Greenberg said. “Some of it is to figure out what exactly is being taught at these universities, and others are just retaliatory and burdensome because of the nature of their request.”
Recently, though, the requests have grown more personal, Margaret Kwoka, a professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and the author of Saving the Freedom of Information Act, said. “One thing we’re starting to see at the state level is a proliferation of what I think are being characterized as abusive or harassing requests that are more politically motivated,” Kwoka told Tow. Deciding what is legitimate and what is burdensome can be tricky, she said: “One person’s view of what is harassing is actually another person’s view of oversight.”
At the same time that North Carolina’s public universities were under pressure to provide class syllabuses, colleges across the country were receiving similar records requests from Metric Media. Metric operates nearly twelve hundred conservative-leaning local news sites, and has posted favorable articles in exchange for payment. In February of 2025, several local news sites owned by Metric sent the simultaneous FOIA requests to administrators at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Illinois, seeking emails and statements that included terms such as “Indigenous” and “Diversity.” But it didn’t end there.
That May, the same month Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced the US would “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students, Metric outlets started asking for detailed information about Chinese students and the departments in which they studied. In 2025, they sent at least four hundred and forty-seven records requests to universities from Florida to Alaska, asking universities to explain how they were monitoring students “to safeguard intellectual property and confidential information.” The papers also sought information about students’ ties to the China Scholarship Council. The organization funds Chinese citizens to study abroad in the US, and a House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party had been pressuring colleges to cut ties with it.
Then, last summer and fall, according to a Tow analysis of Metric’s requests, Metric news sites sent universities across the US nearly a thousand requests for “course syllabi,” “university board member information,” and “college employee compensation data.” One of Metric’s founders, a former journalist named Brian Timpone, described the records requests as an attempt to hold higher-education institutions accountable. “Parents should know what they are paying professors to teach their children,” he told Sampan, a bilingual Chinese-English newspaper that covers New England, last October. “When a parent has to send their child to a university many states away, rather than the state university for which they are paying, they should know the reason. They should know that hundreds of thousands of spots once reserved for in-state students are now given to foreign nationals who aren’t exceptional at all. It’s a complete outrage.”
Kentucky’s Murray State University was among the schools that received Metric’s requests. Timpone told its student newspaper last September that Metric wanted to find out whether state-funded colleges “are actually teaching, or if they’re trying to propagandize you with nonsense.” Timpone did not respond to Tow’s request for comment.
University responses to Metric’s FOIAs were varied. Murray State, for example, provided Metric with Chinese student admission numbers for the 2024–25 school year, but said it had no records on how many scholarships they received, where the scholarships came from, or policies for monitoring students, the university confirmed to Tow. Southern Illinois University outright denied a request from the Carbondale Reporter, a Metric outlet, to release course syllabuses, stating that Illinois’s records laws exempt “course and research materials used by university faculty.” A University of Connecticut official told Metric that the school couldn’t legally release information about the departments where each student studied because doing so could identify them. But according to a June 27, 2025, response the university shared with Tow, it offered to provide Metric with information about which colleges the students attended. Stephanie Reitz, UConn’s director of media relations, said Metric representatives didn’t respond to the offer.
Blanket requests such as the ones filed by Metric have become easier thanks to software advances and the availability of AI. Between January of 2025 and January of 2026, according to Tow’s analysis, Metric filed more than nine thousand FOIA requests across all fifty states. Timpone has disputed that number, telling Tow: “We have sent far more FOIAs than that.” According to the analysis, at least a quarter of those requests—twenty-two hundred and eighty-six—sought records about universities.
The mass filings have strained the agencies and departments charged with responding to requests. The backlog can make it impossible for other requesters, such as journalists and private individuals, to get public records from the same agencies. The Heritage Foundation has boasted about this impact, suggesting that gumming up the system is part of its goal. “Our team has been so effective at flooding government agencies with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that government workers were complaining that ‘the volume of requests from Heritage interfered with their ability to do their job,’” the Heritage Foundation wrote in its 2024 annual report. The Heritage Foundation did not respond to a detailed list of questions from Tow.
Mass FOIA filings can be deemed “vexatious,” a legal term that can allow agencies to refuse to answer them. The deluge of record requests has sparked discussion over whether the current FOIA system is broken, but some public records activists worry that any changes would further limit records access for everyone. Instead, they are advocating for new technology. “I think the government needs to do a better job pushing out information,” Kwoka, the Ohio State law professor, said. “And I think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that would make a big difference in how many requests have to be made every year. Some key investments in technology and personnel would make a really big difference, and yet we just haven’t seen the political will to invest in those sorts of system improvements.”
The Oversight Project and Metric Media are just two of at least four groups backed by conservative donors that have targeted university professors over DEI policies and related teaching materials in the past eighteen months. Accuracy in Media, which describes itself as “a nonprofit that uses investigative journalism and cultural activism to expose corruption,” has released dozens of hidden-camera clips of interactions with professors and university staff who appear undeterred by laws or school policies limiting teaching about equity and inclusive philosophies. And the Student Free Press Association, a nonprofit that trains young conservative journalists, produces the College Fix, a news site whose coverage has been shared by right-wing outlets, including the Daily Caller and Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. Together, Metric Media, Accuracy in Media, and the Student Free Press Association received more than fourteen million dollars for their 2024 operations, according to their most recently released 990 tax filings. That year, the Oversight Project was still part of the Heritage Foundation, which made more than a hundred and thirty million dollars in revenue. The Oversight Project’s 2025 tax filings have not yet been made public.
Metric, Accuracy in Media, and the Student Free Press Association are registered as 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which are forbidden under federal tax law from engaging in election-related political activity. But these groups and the Oversight Project share the same handful of conservative backers, including Donors Trust, which Mother Jones described in 2013 as the “dark-money ATM of the right.” According to the groups’ 2024 tax filings, Donors Trust gave a total of 398,263 dollars to Accuracy in Media and the Student Free Press Association, and 734,673 dollars to the Heritage Foundation, which, at the time, controlled the Oversight Project. Donors Trust had given 1.27 million to Metric Media in 2020.
The Heritage Foundation, which has received more than 1.3 million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation, was another overlapping donor. In 2024, according to tax filings, it gave a hundred thousand dollars to the Student Free Press Association as part of an “Innovation Prize.” In 2024, the Bradley Impact Fund, a donor-advised fund advancing conservative ideas, whose president previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, gave 32,200 dollars to Heritage and forty thousand dollars to the Student Free Press Association. “These people are saying, ‘We don’t like the ideas that are produced through scholarship. We like these other ideas that support our hierarchies, support our version of what the family should be,’” Kamola, the Trinity political science professor and author of Academic Freedom and Dark Money Donors, told Tow.
Kamola said that conservative groups intensified their focus on higher education after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, when they worried that calls for academic reform would necessitate federal intervention to enforce more equitable hiring practices and possibly even reparations. “If there is an argument that says states have a role in addressing systemic issues, then that’s a problem for those with these radical libertarian beliefs,” he told Tow, adding that, as a result, conservative groups have moved to “delegitimize” colleges and universities. “You create these controversies, so then the school is weak, and you can make it easier for your provocateur to come to campus, or for your Koch-funded academic center [to be built] in the name of viewpoint diversity.”
The power of such groups has grown during Trump’s second term. The author of Project 2025’s section on the Department of Education is Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation’s education policy director. In the document, she argued that the government should stop investing in “the many institutions of higher education that are hostile to free expression, open academic inquiry, and American exceptionalism.” She added: “Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.”
Most of the groups that target university professors rely on the internet to spread their message. They often focus on a specific subject that has gained traction online, amplifying one another’s stories and videos through reshares and rewrites. After the death of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk last fall, for example, right-wing activists combed educators’ social media accounts for negative comments about Kirk and posted teachers’ identities in an online “watchlist.” As a result, the American Association of University Professors told Tow that at least forty professors were terminated, suspended, investigated, or otherwise sanctioned.
Scott, the professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study, said that though targeting academic institutions is not new, “the Trump administration has given them the opportunity to do it with a vengeance.” Greenberg, of FIRE, said the internet mob creates an “outrage machine” that chills free expression by making faculty think twice about what they say—and what they teach.
“Seeing senior colleagues being punished for speaking out, I can see why professors would self-censor accordingly,” Greenberg said. “I don’t think it’s a matter of them having thin skin. I think it’s a matter of institutions lacking the backbone and the principle to defend professors when people call for them to be punished for their expression.”
In 2024, Bethany Letiecq, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University, published a research paper about marriage and family dynamics. Conservative outlets the College Fix, the Washington Examiner, and Fox News quickly ran articles and a TV segment blasting Letiecq for criticizing what Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, called the “two-parent married family model.”
The negative coverage sparked death threats, including a phone call Letiecq said she received. (Letiecq reported the call to local police, who issued an arrest warrant for the caller.) George Mason, meanwhile, was about to face a controversy of its own. In June, Glenn Youngkin, who was then the governor of Virginia, appointed Kenneth Marcus to the university’s Board of Visitors, a policymaking and oversight committee. Marcus had previously served in the Trump administration as assistant secretary at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which, in 2023, had named George Mason as one of dozens of universities under investigation for supposed Civil Rights Act violations related to “discrimination involving shared ancestry.”
When he was appointed to George Mason’s board, Marcus told the Jerusalem News Syndicate, “I’ve been proud to support Governor Youngkin’s recent work combating anti-Semitism here in Virginia, including his leadership in legislation adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism.”
Letiecq and two colleagues wrote about Marcus’s political connections in an August 2024 op-ed published in Inside Higher Ed. Later that month, Letiecq was the subject of a blog post published by the nonprofit Defending Education under the headline “George Mason University (CorruptED).” The post targeted a course Letiecq taught and included a copy of her syllabus. According to tax filings, in 2024, Defending Education received nearly a million dollars from Donors Trust and five hundred thousand dollars from the Bradley Impact Fund.
“My syllabi ended up on the Defending Education website. I was like, ‘What is this about?’” Letiecq said. She had never heard of the group, but when Letiecq looked at its tax filings, she found a familiar name: Defending Education’s treasurer was listed as Kenneth Marcus.
“I feel like I was being retaliated against,” Letiecq said. She said she complained to the university. Democrats in the Virginia Senate ultimately blocked Marcus’s appointment to the board. Months later, Defending Education’s president, Nicole Neely, sent FOIA requests to George Mason seeking emails between the university and Letiecq that mentioned Marcus. Letiecq said she has not received notice from the university about whether her correspondence was released. Marcus did not respond to a request for comment.
“Back in the old days, we used to put all of our syllabi up [online] because that could facilitate students’ academic journey,” Letiecq said. Now, she said, doing so makes faculty feel like “sitting ducks and targets of this insanity.”
Educators caught in secretly recorded videos have experienced some of the worst professional consequences. Last spring, Accuracy in Media began posting to its YouTube channel selectively edited videos of university staff and professors talking about navigating DEI bans at their universities.
In “BUSTED: UWF Administrator Exposes Scheme to Evade Florida DEI Ban,” Aurora Osborn, an administrator at the University of West Florida and the director of the school’s Office of Campus Culture and Access, talks about using private funding to pay for diversity initiatives. “State funds cannot be used to be spent on certain programs that promote DEI, but there are other funds involved in running a university, for example donations,” Osborn says in the video.
Accuracy in Media has since posted nearly fifty other gotcha-style video investigations of professors and administrators at universities in states including Ohio, North Carolina, Utah, Texas, Arizona, and Alabama. According to Inside Higher Ed, at least three university employees captured in the films were later removed from their positions. This past June, the Department of Justice announced it was starting a Title VI investigation into diversity, equity, and inclusion practices at Arizona State University following “recent viral videos” that it said showed the school had “denied equal treatment to students based on race, color, or national origin.” The DOJ didn’t offer specifics about the videos or link to them, but Accuracy in Media took credit. The organization pointed to a series it posted online that targeted Arizona State University professors and administrators.
Accuracy in Media declined to answer a detailed list of questions from Tow. “Accuracy in Media’s team of talented, dedicated investigative journalists are focused on determining whether highly paid university administrators are adhering to the law,” Adam Guillette, the organization’s president, said in a statement. “No taxpayer should be forced to pay the salaries of lawbreakers. The hateful, radical activism promoted by many of these employees is divisive and antithetical to the founding principles of our nation. We’re always excited when law enforcement agencies at the state or federal levels take action based on our journalism but we rarely communicate with them.”
A similar undercover video recorded inside a Texas A&M classroom last fall targeted Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer in English, who taught a course on children’s literature. The video was recorded during a September session on gender identity and expression, when a student interrupted McCoul’s lecture and said that she wasn’t “entirely sure this is legal to be teaching because, according to our president, there’s only two genders.” The student appeared to be referring to a January 2025 executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism.” She also said that the lecture contradicted her own religious beliefs. The secret recording was amplified on X by Texas state representative Brian Harrison, who helped it go viral and called for McCoul’s firing.
Texas Scorecard, a local outlet run by the nonprofit Citizens News Guild, covered the story extensively. CNG’s chairman is Timothy Dunn, a Texas oil-and-gas magnate who has donated heavily to conservative and family values causes, as well as to Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign.
Ultimately, McCoul, two Texas A&M staff, and the university’s president—a retired four-star Air Force general—would lose their jobs over the video. In February, McCoul sued the school and several administrators for wrongful termination, accusing them of violating her academic freedom. “The subject matter that the student, and then the university, found problematic was germane to her lesson, consistent with the syllabus, the course description and the catalog description,” her lawyer wrote in a complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
The Texas A&M saga depicted a “worst-case scenario” that is playing out over and over, FIRE’s Greenberg said. “Those groups contact the university or create a big media firestorm calling for the professors to be punished and terminated for their research. And universities do that. They take the bait, they accede to the pressure, they cave to the mob, and they punish their professors.”
Since 2000, nearly seventeen hundred scholars have faced sanctions for their speech. Of that number, according to a FIRE report released last October, about three hundred were terminated or forced to resign. The American Association of University Professors has offered recommendations to schools on how best to respond to FOIA requests. Its primary suggestion is that university legal counsel and faculty should work together to determine what they do and don’t need to release under FOIA law. “It has become really clear that this isn’t just a citizen who is interested in what’s going on in my class, right? These are partisan hacks who want to score political points by misrepresenting what takes place in my class,” Kamola said. “I think the institutions have an obligation to defend their faculty from that partisan interference.”
Universities can push back against requests, but they may be unwilling to engage in legal battles. “A lot of schools are saying, ‘We’re just going to keep our heads down and hope that we don’t get noticed, and we’ll just ride this one out,’” Kamola said. “It’s a bad strategy. It’s a losing strategy.”
Reporting by the Chronicle of Higher Education has found that since 2023, nineteen states have passed laws that prohibit colleges from having DEI offices, ban mandatory diversity training, forbid universities from using diversity statements in hiring or promotion, or block colleges from considering race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions and employment. A study by PEN America this year found that thirty-eight universities have been proposed for suspension from federal research partnerships over DEI hiring practices. In 2009, Texas became the first state to implement legislation mandating that college syllabuses be shared publicly; since 2024, Utah, Indiana, and Ohio have passed similar laws. University systems in Georgia, Iowa, and Florida have also implemented requirements for syllabuses to be made public.
The Oversight Project is on track to expand its public records campaign. It plans to send FOIA requests to all public universities, seeking any syllabuses that mention DEI policies, as well as university data on their Chinese students, as part of the organization’s “fifty-state solution,” Howell told Tow. He said he couldn’t say how many FOIA responses the organization has received so far, but that it intends to publish them “as soon as practical,” adding: “It’s not imminent. We don’t know what we got yet.” He said the Oversight Project also plans to fundraise for future legal battles. “I think there’s going to be a lot of patriots across the country and foundations that want to support such efforts,” Howell said. “It could be in the tens of millions if all goes well.”
In December, the UNC system announced that instead of rejecting FOIA requests for syllabuses on the basis that they constitute intellectual property, it would now consider syllabuses “directed works,” making them subject to FOIA. It was a total reversal. The president of the UNC system, Peter Hans, said the new policy aims to “promote transparency amid scrutiny.”
A month later, the UNC public records office reopened the Oversight Project’s previously denied request seeking any syllabus that contained DEI-related terms, including “critical race theory” and “microaggressions.” The school notified the relevant professors that their syllabuses were being relinquished.
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