Q&A: Scott Walter, Capital Research Center

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Q&A: Scott Walter, Capital Research Center
Scott Walter testifies before Georgia sub-committee in 2020 
Courtesy | WXIA-TV, Atlanta 

Scott Walter is president of the Capital Research Center, a research organization in Washington, D.C., that studies how foundations and nonprofit groups spend their money.

 

What is the goal of modern education? 

In my day, in the 1980s at Georgetown University, my good professors would complain that the kids thought education was a means to an end. You go to school to get the skills for a job and then make money. It’s D.C., after all. But then, education became worse, becoming simple indoctrination. Now it exists to train the student to be a passive consumer of the regime’s demand, to obey the structures of authority, and comply with its decrees.

Who are the members of this ruling regime in education and government?

The regime is what governs our way of life. Take, for instance, your atrocious governor of Michigan. What does she want out of the college kid who comes to Michigan? She wants somebody who will passively submit to her regime. That’s what she wants.

For example, say I want to start a business and make money. She can’t tolerate that because I might use my resources and become rebellious against her vaccination mandates. Ultimately, you need to be a passive submitter to the regime’s demands.

Who is giving to higher educational institutions?

The average donor may look back fondly on his beer-swilling college days and decide to donate to his alma mater. While there might be some crazy radicals teaching at his beloved alma mater, he believes they’ll do something worthwhile with the money he is going to give them anyway. Although the average donor may have good intentions, the whole campus is run by radicals, and his dollars are going to go to terrible things that he doesn’t want.

If you endow a chair at the average modern university, it will end up in the hands of radicals.

Take chairs of free enterprise, for example. You have some rich, libertarian old guy, and he thinks, “By God, I’m going to endow a chair in free enterprise at the enormous state university where I went. If I do that there’s no way they can ever teach communism!”

Actually, virtually every single holder of a chair, labeled free market or free enterprise, was actually held by some whacked person who hates markets, free economy, and free enterprise.

Why is it that higher education is usually dominated by leftist ideology?

Antonio Gramsci was one of the great theorists of this in the 20th century and he said: “We have kept the long march through the institutions.” Marx was really a crude materialist in the 19th century. He thinks that money is the key to everything.

The smarter leftists in the 20th century came to realize that cultural institutions are the way to take power. It’s not going to work through economics because socialist economics doesn’t work at all. So the left must take them over, whether it’s the churches, the universities, and the rest.

They had an enormous amount of money. Because of the big foundations in America: Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, MacArthur Foundations provided the money. The radicals hired their own and rose higher and higher until they had control of institutions.

How does critical race theory fit into leftist control of educational institutions?

Who did the 1619 project? Nikole Hannah-Jones. What was she before that? She was a MacArthur Genius fellow, she got a $600,000 grant as a genius fellow from afar, which you can be sure didn’t hurt having on her resume when the New York Times just decided whether to hire her. That’s another central thing to this, everything they understand comes from a lust for money and power above all, but money’s really helpful to get the power and it’s obviously a happy circle there.