Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) on November 4, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
The American Conservative, a magazine that has endured numerous editorial changes since its founding in 2002 by Pat Buchanan, is currently under the control of executive director Curt Mills. In its recent embodiment, the magazine has moved to the region of American politics inhabited by those who see the world shaped by dire conspiracies, many of which they suppose to be run by Israel and American Jews. Such fringe ideology is usually best ignored, but now and then, it imposes itself on our attention.
Last week, Mr. Mills published an article in the American Conservative titled, “The Latest Anti-Semitism Campus Canard,” subtitled “Inside new attempts to replicate ‘DEI’ tactics for the right on one elite college campus: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The neocon oligarch Paul Singer’s fingerprints would seem to be all over it.”
The article consists of Mr. Mills’s free-form imagining of links among disparate dots, along with wholly invented dots. His aim, as usual, is to find fault with Jews in general, and in this case, with the entrepreneur Paul Singer.
I judge that a detailed reply by NAS is not needed, but I want to note for the record that, while the Singer Foundation has contributed financial support to several NAS projects in the last few years, contrary to Mr. Mills, our website, Minding the Campus, is not “a Singer-funded” group. The Manhattan Institute did indeed found Minding the Campus in 2007, but later spun it off as an independent entity under the direction of John Leo. In 2020, Mr. Leo deeded Minding the Campus to NAS. It was a small operation and had no financial or other support from the Manhattan Institute. We essentially reinvented it and made it into a vigorous opinion site that is today under the editorship of Jared Gould.
Contrary to Mr. Mills, neither Minding the Campus nor NAS has received financial support from Pitkin Media, Max Neuberger, or Level Three Labs. We don’t know what these entities are or why Mr. Mills believes they have some connection to NAS.
The Singer Foundation, which made its first grant to the NAS in 2019, is one of more than two dozen foundations that contribute to NAS. We are grateful for that support, but the Singer Foundation does not direct our research priorities or publications. Mr. Mills also points out that several figures associated with the Manhattan Institute have published articles on Minding the Campus. They are among the several hundred writers who have published there, and we are grateful that they see our website as a platform worthy of their essays. Mill’s also mentions an article, “The Takeover,” written by Neetu Arnold. Ms. Arnold later went to work for the Manhattan Institute, but contrary to Mr. Mills, she wrote “The Takeover” while working at NAS.
Mr. Mills’s efforts to wrap NAS tightly to the Singer Foundation and the Manhattan Institute are conjectural and, as it happens, false. This does not mean we would be displeased if either the Foundation or the Institute wanted to become more robust in their ties to NAS.
The main theme of Mr. Mills’s article is that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been falsely accused of anti-Semitism. NAS published a report on October 3, “Should Science Go to Die A Case Study of Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” In that report, we draw attention to anti-Semitic incidents at MIT. But the research and the report had no connection to the Singer Foundation or the Manhattan Institute. Mr. Mills’s dots simply do not connect; some are not even dots.
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