BY JAMES FINKELSTEIN, BETHANY LETIECQ, AND TIM GIBSON

From Conservative Oversight to Extreme Partisan Activism

Republican governors in Virginia have long appointed conservatives to university governing boards, but nowhere has this been more pronounced than at George Mason University. This trend began in July 1996, when Governor George Allen appointed Edwin Feulner, co-founder and president of the Heritage Foundation, and Edwin Meese III, former U.S. Attorney General under President Reagan, to Mason’s Board of Visitors (BOV). Allen’s subsequent appointees included Richard Fink, executive vice president of Koch Industries and a key architect of the Mercatus Center, and William Kristol, founder of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard.

Governor James Gilmore continued this pattern, appointing James Miller III, a Reagan administration official who had chaired the Federal Trade Commission and later served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Meese became the Rector (Board Chair), a role he held for four years, while Miller chaired the Academic Affairs Committee. Other Gilmore appointees included John (Jack) Herrity, a local Republican firebrand, Dorothy Gray, a former Senate Republican Policy Committee official, and Manuel Johnson, another Reagan administration alumnus.

Youngkin’s Appointments: A New Era of Extreme Partisan Activism

Fast forward a quarter-century, and Governor Glenn Youngkin has taken this approach to a new level—appointing not just conservatives but extreme partisan activists with direct ties to influential right-wing organizations. We have been documenting this alarming politicization of the board, noting that the Governor may see board activism as his only mechanism for attacking higher education in a state where Democrats control the legislature.

Two Heritage Foundation staff members are among Youngkin’s Mason Board of Visitors (BOV) appointees: Cully Stimson, current Rector and author of Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities, and Lindsey Burke, chair of the Academic Programs, Diversity, and University Community Committee at Mason and author of the Project 2025 education agenda, which seeks to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and Head Start (among other education targets, including higher education).

Youngkin recently appointed Kenneth Marcus to the BOV. Marcus founded the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. He has led efforts to equate antisemitism with anti-Zionism, pushing universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as a basis for discrimination complaints. We recently wrote a public commentary supporting state lawmakers’ efforts to remove him from this post.

Other members of Mason’s BOV include:

• A Trump-appointed former ambassador
• Vice President Pence’s former Chief of Staff
• Edwin Meese’s son
• An officer from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a conservative higher education watchdog group
• Another former Heritage Foundation staffer
• The Deputy Attorney General and Acting Attorney General in the first Trump Administration

A Shift in Board Behavior: From Conservative Oversight to Ideological Control

While highly conservative, the BOV of 25 years ago primarily focused on financial stewardship and institutional growth. They rarely interfered in academic matters, and faculty pushed back when they did. In 2000, when the board attempted to meddle in the general education curriculum, the Faculty Senate swiftly and courageously organized a censure, keeping the BOV in its lane. Even Meese, despite his ideological leanings, understood his role: When ordered by the governor not to request additional funding for Mason, he reportedly replied that his duty was to strengthen the university, not serve as an agent of the administration.

How things have changed. Today, under Youngkin’s appointees, the Mason BOV has repeatedly ignored faculty governance, upended long-standing academic processes, ignored public meetings laws, and imposed an overt ideological agenda, including:

• Overruling Faculty on General Education: Last year, the BOV discarded years of faculty-led efforts to revise the Mason Core by eliminating the proposed “Just Societies” requirement.
• Interfering in Faculty Promotion & Tenure: The board demanded full review of tenure and promotion dossiers, a level of involvement unheard of at most research universities.
• Forcing Institutional “Neutrality” Without Faculty Input: While some universities have carefully deliberated adopting statements like the Kalven Report, Mason’s BOV forced through a neutrality policy over objections from the Faculty Senate, GMU-AAUP, and multiple campus groups.

 Weaponizing Antisemitism Policy to Stifle Campus Discourse and Protest

More recently, the BOV—led by Kenneth Marcus—has pushed an aggressive agenda under the guise of combating antisemitism. This has included mandating the IHRA working definition of antisemitism in Mason’s nondiscrimination policy, despite faculty concerns (as well as AAUP and ACLU concerns, among others) that this infringes on First Amendment protections and academic freedom.

And just this week, the BOV has moved to consider a Resolution on Antisemitism, which includes protections for both Jewish and Israeli students, with clear language that criticism of the state of Israel or Zionism will not be tolerated. The resolution also includes:

• Imposing Restrictions on Campus Events & Organizations: A proposed resolution would prohibit Mason from sponsoring or endorsing any activity deemed inconsistent with the IHRA definition—effectively chilling campus discussions on Israel and Palestine.
• Requiring International Applicants to Acknowledge Mason’s Policy on Antisemitism—a highly unusual mandate, suggesting that the board preemptively targets specific student populations.

While the resolution pays lip service to academic freedom, its broad and vague language creates the potential for severe disciplinary actions: “The university shall have no tolerance for antisemitic actions, conduct, or activities on its campus. Violators may face suspension, expulsion, or termination. The President shall report violations to the board each semester.”

Among Virginia universities, Mason is virtually alone in explicitly codifying the IHRA definition into policy; Virginia Commonwealth University is the only other institution to include this definition.

This latest move by the Board of Visitors appears aligned with Project Esther—like Project 2025, another Heritage Foundation initiative. According to The Forward, one of the nation’s most prominent independent Jewish media outlets, “The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, a conservative plan to counter antisemitism, sees the problem as one in which a handful of ‘masterminds,’ including Jews like George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, are seeking to ‘dismantle Western democracies, values and culture.'”

Universities are a primary target of Project Esther. The document includes statements such as:

• “The HSN (Hamas Support Network) and its affiliated HSOs are likely in every state in the Union, are active on most university and college campuses, and are likely connected by both ideology and other tangible ties.” (p. 8)
• “HSOs (Hamas Support Organizations) have infiltrated their ideology into the U.S. education system across all levels. It is pervasive. The U.S. education system fosters antisemitism under the guise of ‘pro-Palestinian,’ anti-Israel, anti-Zionist narratives across universities, high schools, and elementary schools, often under the umbrella or within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology.” (pg. 10)
• “By exploiting fissures within and among…organizations and their target audiences, we will generate strategic dilemmas across the entire HSN front. Whether in the halls of academia or in the halls of power, HSN supporters and influence targets must be made to feel extreme discomfort. We will generate that discomfort.” (p. 26)

Given these stated objectives, we fear that Project Esther is already being implemented at Mason and that the tactics outlined in the Heritage Foundation report will be used to intimidate students, faculty, and staff, suppress free speech, and undermine academic freedom.

This escalation of extreme partisan activism and ideological governance at Mason is unprecedented and should concern all of higher education. The board’s interventions in curriculum, faculty hiring, and campus speech reflect a broader effort to reshape higher education through a conservative lens. Unlike past boards that sought to grow Mason as an institution, today’s BOV appears more focused on controlling its intellectual direction and dismantling parts of the institution that do not accord with its ideology. Some of us have wondered whether we are experiencing McCarthyism 2.0, but we now fear it is much worse.

In Part II, we examine the board’s latest efforts to consolidate ideological control, including its puzzling resurrection of the 50-year-old Shils Report, and explore the broader implications for faculty governance, academic freedom, and the future of public higher education. Part II will follow on Monday.

James Finkelstein is a professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason University. Bethany Letiecq is a professor of education and human development at George Mason University and serves as president of GMU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Tim Gibson is an associate professor of communication at George Mason University and serves as president of the Virginia Conference of the American Association of University Professors.