Red flags fly after conservative harassment network targeting teachers exposed: 'Chilling'

A shadowy network of conservative activist groups, backed by Koch-linked dark money, is deploying hidden cameras and mass public-records requests to hunt down and destroy the careers of college professors and administrators — and it's working.

An investigation from Columbia's Tow Center found that right-wing groups including Accuracy in Media, the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project, and the "pink-slime" news network Metric Media have flooded universities nationwide with Freedom of Information Act requests demanding syllabuses, emails and course materials containing words like "diversity," "queer" and "Indigenous." Metric Media alone filed more than 9,000 FOIA requests across all 50 states in a single year, disguising the campaign as accountability journalism through sites masquerading as local news outlets.

The effort appears to tie into the Heritage Foundation's infamous "Project 2025" manifesto for reshaping the government in a right-wing image, which condemned higher education as an “establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats.’”

Metric Media co-founder Brian Timpone defended the tactics bluntly, insisting, "Parents should know what they are paying professors to teach their children."

According to the report, Accuracy in Media's undercover hidden-camera videos alone cost at least three university employees their jobs, while a secretly filmed lecture at Texas A&M cost senior lecturer Melissa McCoul her position after a student challenged her class on gender identity, citing President Donald Trump's executive order asserting there are only two genders. McCoul, two staffers, and the university's own president all lost their jobs over the fallout. She's since sued for wrongful termination.

The groups share overlapping funders, including Donors Trust — once dubbed the "dark-money ATM of the right" — and the Charles Koch Foundation. Since 2000, nearly 1,700 scholars nationwide have faced sanctions over their speech, with roughly 300 terminated or forced to resign, according to a free-speech watchdog's tally.

Experts warn the strategy isn't really about transparency — it's about intimidation, chilling what professors are willing to say or teach before the cameras and FOIA requests ever show up at their door.

“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,” said retired Institute for Advanced Study professor Joan Scott. “And it has a chilling effect, which is the point.” Meanwhile, Ohio State professor Margaret Kwoka 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.”