Social conservatives have heeded the advice of Robert Weaver who convincingly argued that “ideas have consequences” and have gained the intellectual and political legitimacy needed to take their political and social ideology to the American public through the academy. The creation of philanthropic organizations and policy institutes allowed for social conservatives to move from being the political elite with aspirations to become the governing elite. To carry out the ideological attack against liberalism in the academy, conservatives developed think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, philanthropic organizations including the Bradley foundation which gave heavily to academic change organizations such as the National Academy of Scholars and the Madison Center for Educational Affairs. These organizations in turn financed scholars whose research reflected conservative political and social ideology, established college conservative newspaper training programs, organized speaker bureaus for conservative ideologues and supported legislation that would rid the nation of affirmative action.
The economics of race helps to explain more precisely the reason why Black Studies was bore the brunt of this conservative ideological attack during the academic culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, although racism and racial chauvinism did factor into the equation. As described in case studies of individual Black Studies departments, the Academic Culture Wars had a profound impact on student enrollment, faculty hiring and institutional support for Black Studies. Certainly the financial implications of the Academic Culture War were most profoundly felt at the public comprehensive universities where access to philanthropic support from the Ford Foundation was not available. Although Black Studies departments in the comprehensive, teaching based institutions may have felt the effects of the Culture War attacks on the discipline more acutely than their elite, research based university peers, the entire discipline continues to “suffer the burdens of its beginnings” and must continually defend its right to exist within the hallowed halls of academe. The Culture Wars may have not dismantled Black Studies but it has made the stability of the field far less certain as a result.