State Group Funds National Attack on DEI

U.S Flag and money. (Pexels license)

Precisely when or why the Searle Family Trust landed in Wisconsin is unclear. It was originally located in Chicago, but the conservative foundation has been located in liberal Madison since as least 2020, and has been a major player nationally pushing for conservative causes. It most recently popped up in a New York Times story documenting a well-funded national attack on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs at public universities.

Led by the Claremont Institute, “a California-based think tank with close ties to the Trump movement and to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida,” a group of conservatives “coalesced roughly three years ago around a sweeping ambition: to strike a killing blow against ‘the leftist social justice revolution’” by eliminating DIE at American universities.

“Setting their sights on well-known schools like Texas A&M, they researched which offices and employees should be expunged,” the story reported. Their findings were reported to a State Senate committee and the “campaign quickly yielded results: In May, Texas approved legislation banishing all such programs from public institutions of higher learning…In 2023, more than 20 states considered or approved new laws taking aim at D.E.I., even as polling has shown that diversity initiatives remain popular.”

One of those states was Wisconsin, where Republican legislators were successful in withholding funding for the Universities of Wisconsin until its leaders agreed to slash DEI staff.

Much of the ammunition for this well-organized blitzkrieg against DEI came from the Searle Family Trust, which funded “a Claremont effort to inventory what it considered ‘C.R.T. [critical race theory] courses’ that had ‘metastasized throughout Higher Ed,’” according to a funding proposal. The Searle trust also agreed to back a project examining critical race theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the story noted.

According to SourceWatch, which monitors funding by right-wing foundations, the Searle foundation’s federal tax forms show it has been a regular funder to the Claremont Institute, giving $150,000 in 2022, $180,000 in 2021, $130,000 in 2020 and $130,000 in 2019.

The funding is in line with the wishes of Daniel C. Searle, the businessman who created the foundation in 1998 and died in 2007. He was the great-grandson of Gideon Daniel Searle, founder of pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle, whose best-known products today are Metamucil and NutraSweet. The company was headquartered in Skokie and the family home in Winnetka, both in metro Chicago. Daniel Searle began working with the company in the 1950s, becoming president in 1966 and CEO in 1970. He also was an investor in the Milwaukee Braves and Chicago Bulls teams.

In 1977, he hired Republican heavyweight Donald Rumsfeld to become Searle’s CEO and president, and Daniel Searle took the chairman’s post. Rumsfeld had previously served as a Secretary of Defense in the Ford administration and as a U.S. Representative whose successful run for Congress 15 years earlier had gotten financial backing from Daniel Searle. In 1985, Rumsfeld negotiated a deal to sell the company to Monsanto for $2.7 billion. The Searle family, which owned just under 35% of the company stock, took home some $800 million.

Daniel’s share of the money helped him become a major philanthropist. His donations initially went to Chicago-area institutions—such as the Art Institute, Northwestern University, and the Botanic Garden. But beginning in the mid-1990s, Searle began to reconsider this. He was once quoted saying his “rise to the top was a mixture of both merit and an accident of birth.” You might think he would spend some of that money to help those less fortunate than him. But Searle had a different revelation. “I began to wonder: What if we could change the slope of the curve that leads to more loss of freedom,” as his foundation’s website quotes him.  

With that in mind he created the Searle Freedom Trust in 1998. Its creation was influenced by Milwaukee’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of conservative policy making. Searle hired Kimberly Dennis as an advisor. She had worked for five years (1980-1985) under Michael Joyce at the conservation Olin Foundation. Joyce went on to run the newly created Bradley Foundation, where he created a template for its approach to giving. The Bradley Foundation was one of the foundations whose mission statement Searle studied before creating his foundation. And once it was created, Searle funded many of the same groups that Bradley funded: The American Enterprise Institute (Searle has been one of its largest donors), Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Federalist Society, Reason Foundation and many more.

Along with the Bradley foundation, Searle has been one of the three biggest funders of climate change denial, the other being the Sarah Scaife Foundation. According to a 2017 study conducted by researchers at Drexel University, between 2003 and 2010, the Searle Family Trust contributed $21.7 million to organizations that deny or downplay climate change, and since then has continued to give millions more.

Searle, along with Bradley and Charles Koch’s foundation, have been the three top funders of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which provides workshops and model bills for state legislators to pass conservative policies.

And the Bradley and Searle foundations have been two of the top donors to efforts led by Edward Blum to overturn affirmative action at universities. Searle gave $650,000 to Blum’s Project on Fair Representation in 2013, another $500,000 in 2015 and promised $500,000 more in 2016. Ultimately the effort was successful, with the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturning affirmative action in a case involving Harvard University.

Just how wide-ranging is the Searle agenda was suggested by a Guardian story in 2013 describing a coordinated strategy by the foundation and many other groups to implement a conservative agenda in 34 states to cut pay to state government employees; oppose public sector collective bargaining; reduce public sector services in education and healthcare; promote school vouchers; reduce or eliminate income and sales taxes and study a proposed reform of Medicare.

As for its more recent funding of the effort to dismantle DIE, the Times story quoted an email from Chris Ross, a Claremont fund-raising official, saying that “The Searle kids don’t like wokery,” apparently referring to the adult children of Daniel Searle.

By now Searle has been dead for 16 years. Before his death he had entrusted his foundation’s leadership to Kimberly Dennis, who had worked with him for years and it was under her leadership that the foundation moved to Chicago. Dennis is by now “a longtime operative in the right-wing philanthropy network,” as one group described her, and the co-founder and chair of Donors Trust, the dark-money ATM of the right that backs the most influential groups in the conservative movement. Among the many boards she serves on is that of The Earhart Foundation, which helped promoters of neo-Confederacy and “share[s] cross-membership with racist organizations such as the white supremacist League of the South,” according to the watchdog group Monitoring Influence. 

But Searle had no trust that any future leader of his foundation, apparently including his children, would stick to his mission, so the fund was set up to sunset by the end of 2025. How much the fund started with in 1998 is unknown, but later federal 990 tax forms show its assets have markedly declined from $167.6 million in 2015 to $120 million in 2019 to $76.9 million in 2022.

“The Trust does not intend to make large send-off grants as it nears its closing date,” its website notes, but “will award most final grants in 2024… sharply reduce its grantmaking in 2025” and shut down at the end of that year. For the Claremont Institute, ALEC and so many other conservative groups the Searle Freedom Trust has funded, its death will be greatly mourned.