The Invisible Hand: How Dark Money Is Inventing Prestige for Right-Wing Academics

The American Academy of Sciences and Letters sounds prestigious, but is it really?

This report was produced in partnership with The Skeptical Scientist newsletter and has been updated from its original email version.

On October 24, an organization called the American Academy of Sciences and Letters (AASL) honored Stanford University Professor and health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya with its Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom. 

Announcing the award, the group praised the professor for “resolutely” resisting “enormous pressure to compromise his scientific findings” and risking “his own personal and professional self-interest, repeatedly, without hesitation, to take a stand for the public’s right to unrestricted scientific discussion and debate.” A few days later, The New York Post picked up the story, running it with the headline, “Scientist who battled for COVID common sense over media and government censors wins top award.” 

“Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award,” the article began. “The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.”

It is true that Bhattacharya is a controversial figure for his contrarian stance on the COVID-19 pandemic. He first burst onto the national scene in 2020 as the co-author of an inaccurate and bias-prone, but influential, seroprevalence study that significantly underestimated the dangers of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Later, he was one of three authors of The Great Barrington Declaration, a widely rebuked document that outlined the failed pandemic herd immunity strategy embraced by the Trump administration. Since then, the professor has been a go-to expert for Republican politicians and right-wing groups working to politicize public health and government efforts to control COVID. He has taken to claiming that he was censored by the federal government for his views and even unsuccessfully sued the Biden administration over his claims.

Bhattacharya has also cultivated alliances with anti-vaxxers. Last month, a health policy symposium he organized at Stanford came under fire for featuring a number of them along with minimizers and lab leak enthusiasts. He spoke at the Robert Kennedy Jr. campaign’s vice presidential announcement, has been proposed by RFK Jr. for a leadership role in CDC, and is currently listed on Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again website as a potential pick for director of the National Institutes of Health.

But Bhattacharya’s reputation is not the only explanation for the lack of media attention given to the award ceremony, which took place in the vaunted Library of Congress. Another is the fact that the AASL is largely unknown. The group only emerged in 2022, fueled by the private family foundation of an investment fund CEO. A closer look at AASL and its origins and activities provides a disturbing window into how wealthy business interests are working to reshape academia in support of their agenda.

What is the AASL?

The AASL website features an impressive picture of the Library of Congress, a Board of Trustees hailing from elite academic institutions, and almost nothing about the organization or its origins. That’s because, despite its name suggesting a long, storied history—echoing esteemed institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences,the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters—the AASL did not exist until 2022. At the time of this writing, the group has no Wikipedia page and its official X account, created in November 2023, has 318 followers and has posted a total of 38 times as of this report.

The donor list on AASL’s IRS Form 990 is “restricted,” so the exact source of the $1.5 million fundraising haul 2023 is unknown. However, some digging reveals that at least a third of the money came from the John and Dania Barry Family Foundation. AASL’s annual award, which it started giving out in 2023, is called the Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement.

John F. Barry III is the CEO of the investment fund Prospect Capital Corporation. He originally launched his foundation in 2014 as The Invisible Hand Foundation before changing the name to the less sinister-sounding John and Daria Barry Family Foundation. A major focus of the organization is establishing a foothold for conservatism in the highest echelons of academia. To that end, the group offers a “John & Daria Barry Scholarship” seemingly for conservative students at Oxford. Recipients have graduated from right-wing schools like Brigham Young University and Hillsdale College. One interned at the conservative think tank the Hudson Institute. Another interned in the Office of Condoleezza Rice “where her research on school choice was used to create an interactive map for the Hoover Institution.” 

By far the largest chunk of the money the Barry Foundation has distributed in grants—more than $20 million starting in 2014—has gone to a single organization, The Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (FEHE). FEHE’s stated mission is advancing “academic and cultural renewal,” but the group’s real work appears to be creating beachheads for conservative ideology at elite universities like Yale, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Stanford, and more.

Right-wing groups have long sought to carve out conservative influence pockets in academia, going back to the 1970s. The beachhead strategy was originally pioneered in the early 1980s by the late John M. Olin and his now defunct personal foundation.

FEHE was launched in 2013. Its original trustees included religious right leader and Princeton University Professor Robert P. George, who is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the first Barry Prize recipients, as well as Luis Tellez, who is now the group’s president. Both men are connected to another beachhead operation, the conservative Witherspoon Institute at Princeton—George is its founder while Tellez serves as president. Witherspoon has received funding over the years from right-wing power brokers like Trump ‘judge whisperer’ Leonard Leo and billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.

FEHE sponsors programs like the Civil Discourse Project at Duke University, which purports to be aimed at creating intellectually diverse communities through “freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression for faculty and students alike.” What the program really does is create safe spaces for students to discuss the conservative position on major issues. The program’s webpage features a Wall Street Journal editorial by one of its professors titled, “How I Liberated My College Classroom,” boasting about how  after January 6, they were able to humanize Trump supporters for their class and dispel the idea that they were motivated by sexism or racism. The James Madison Program at Princeton, which George is director of, is also FEHE. Aside from programs, the organization lists other dark money groups as part of its network, including AASL, Witherspoon, and the Zephyr Institute, which serves conservative students, scholars, and professionals at Stanford. Noted vaccine skeptic Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is a senior fellow and program director at Zephyr.

AASL’s board of trustees is drawn from the many of the same institutions FEHE has been seeding with support for conservative ideology. Although it is not clear how the prize recipients are selected, 16 of 20 have been faculty members at the same institutions supported by FEHE. 

Other Connections

Beyond FEHE AASL is linked to a number of other right-wing groups as well. In particular, the group has ties to the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank housed in the tower that looms over Stanford’s campus. Eight of nine AASL members affiliated with the school are from Hoover. AASL trustee Brandice Canes-Wrone is a senior fellow at the think tank and director of its Center for Revitalizing American Institutions. 2023 Barry Prize recipients Steven Koonin, a physicist who wrote a climate change denial book, and Josiah Ober are Hoover senior fellows. So too are newly invested AASL members Sir Niall Ferguson, a colonialism-defending Stanford historian who came under scrutiny for targeting a liberal student at the school, Bhattacharya, Barry Stuart Strauss, Caroline Hoxby, and Peter Berkowitz, who served in the Trump administration’s State Department as Policy Planning Director.

Through Ferguson and Bhattacharya, AASL connects to other right-wing groups as well. The former is on the advisory board of the international right-wing Alliance for Responsible Citizenship along with Jordan Peterson, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Vivek Ramaswamy, and others. The latter, meanwhile, is tied to a number of groups like the UK-based anti-lockdown charity Collateral Global, the anti-vaccine Brownstone Institute, the Australia-based contrarian think tank Australians for Science and Freedom, and the COVID denial group PANDA. He has also participated in at least one event for the Council for National Policy, a shadowy and influential Christian right group.

A Familiar Strategy

When asked for his assessment of AASL, Bruce Alberts, UCSF biochemist and former President of the National Academy of Sciences told Important Context he had “never heard of them.” Neither had Angela Rasmussen, a virologist who has taught at Columbia and the University of Washington. Rasmussen expressed alarm at the growing association of far-right organizations with elite academic institutions, explaining that while such alliances are often justified on the grounds of academic freedom, the true agenda of the groups is suppressing dissent and skimming institutional credibility for their views. 

“To put it more bluntly, they are laundering lying extremist bullshit in institutional reputations to make them more palatable to a broad audience, at the expense of the entire academic and scientific enterprise,” she said.

Indeed, while AASL claims to be neither right nor left-wing, its honorees tell a different story. The group is laundering the reputations of fringe voices favored by the political right by giving those individuals awards alongside more mainstream academics. The presence of the latter gives the former and the group an appearance of legitimacy.

In its inaugural year, just a year before honoring Bhattacharya, AASL gave its intellectual freedom medal to Sir. Salman Rushdie. This year’s Barry Prizes went to renowned political scientist and law professor Akhil Reed Amar of Yale, renowned historian William Chester Jordan of Princeton, and Emmy and Peabody award winner Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

The tactic of manufacturing synthetic prestige through association, pretense, and ceremony are hardly novel. The Federalist Society, for example, which has previously hosted Bhattacharya, cozies up to mainstream academics along with right-wing figures. It has previously given Amar its annual Bator Award, the predecessor to the Story Award. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a major funder of right-wing causes, also gives out annual awards—Bhattacharya received the $250,000 Bradley Prize in May.

Another example of manufactured prestige is Bhattacharya’s Great Barrington Declaration itself, which was organized through a libertarian think tank, the American Institute for Economic Research, with help from Trump’s health care policy adviser, Scott Atlas. The document provided an academic veneer to the laissez-faire COVID response favored by the Trump administration and right-wing dark money groups. While none of its authors had been on the clinical or public health front lines for the pandemic, their affiliations with Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford offered credibility by association. The day after the signing, they were booked for a meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar—Atlas was also in attendance—to draw even more attention to the declaration.

The institutions that provide academic homes to those honored by the AASL have shown little inclination to look this particular gift horse in the mouth. Stanford’s Health Policy Department, Yale, and Notre Dame, for example, released boastful announcements of the accolades, adding another layer of apparent legitimacy to the organization. None noted its age or origins.

Stanford’s announcement stated that the “The American Academy of Sciences & Letters has awarded SHP’s Jay Bhattacharya its highest honor for intellectual freedom for his ‘extraordinary courage’ in voicing his views and challenging some government policies during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Following the lead of the AASL they noted at the bottom that “the honor went to the writer Salman Rushdie last year.”

AASL did not respond to our request for comment.