Little-Known Network of Higher Ed Institutes Has Roots in Anti–Gay Marriage Fight and Opus Dei

The Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education touts its proximity to prestigious universities: Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale—even the University of Oxford. It’s right there on its website: “Established in 2012 as an independent, nonpartisan, grant-making organization, FEHE funds and advises programs at elite universities where the next generation of cultural leaders are formed.”

The foundation says it supports a growing network of more than 25 institutes or programs based on or near the campuses of top universities, which also include Johns Hopkins University, Rice University and the Universities of Chicago; Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh; California, Berkeley; and Texas at Austin. These entities promote the study of a range of topics: civil discourse, civics, ethics, theology, Catholic thought, Western thought, family, human flourishing, living “the good life” and exploring deep human questions. The network teaches, funds and places numerous scholars in its various programs.

While FEHE calls itself “independent” and “nonpartisan,” its president is Luis Tellez, who’s also president of the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative think tank adjacent to Princeton’s campus that became prominent in the fight against same-sex marriage. While FEHE’s most recent IRS filings call the Witherspoon Institute “an unrelated not for profit organization,” they also say FEHE’s officers “are paid through the Witherspoon Institute” and show FEHE and Witherspoon share an address and phone number.

Tellez was among the founders of the National Organization for Marriage, another leading group in the lost battle against legalizing same-sex marriage. He’s also long been a leader within Opus Dei, the controversial conservative Roman Catholic group that’s been around for nearly a century and was fictionalized in The Da Vinci Code. (Opus Dei, on its website, says FEHE doesn’t have “a formal relationship or agreement with Opus Dei, which would in any case be quite legitimate.”)

The foundation does not reveal its donors in its most recent reports to the IRS. Ralph Wilson, founder of the Corporate Genome Project and a co-founder of UnKoch My Campus, two progressive groups, has nonetheless identified some of its recent major funders, which Inside Higher Ed confirmed by looking at the IRS Form 990s that nonprofit donors must submit. FEHE did reveal its donors in previous years, and some of those donors’ own IRS reports show they’ve continued to give.

Some have given a lot, according to their Form 990s. FEHE has received millions of dollars each from the Bradley Impact Fund, which calls itself “a donor-advised fund for conservatives”; the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, which says it supports “free enterprise” and instilling “America’s founding values”; the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which donates to multiple conservative groups; and the John and Daria Barry Foundation/Invisible Hand Foundation, which funds environmental and veterans’ causes alongside its support of FEHE and K-12 schools.

Many of the programs FEHE funds could be broadly labeled “conservative,” but their specific missions vary. The network includes the long-standing James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, directed by conservative Princeton professor Robert George, and the Penn Initiative for the Study of Markets, whose vision statement says there’s “no historical example of enduring and broad prosperity in a nation without” open markets. There’s also the Academic Freedom Alliance, a defender of that namesake higher education tradition—and one that protects faculty on both the left and the right. Still, like others within the FEHE network, it has promoted other parts of the network online.

Tellez himself has articulated a conservative mission for FEHE, according to a speech attributed to him from 2022. An Opus Dei center chaplain posted a transcript online. (Foundation staff didn’t confirm or deny that Tellez gave the speech when asked by Inside Higher Ed. Tellez didn’t respond to requests for an interview for this story.)

In the speech, Tellez denounced “cultural Marxism,” saying, “We’re experiencing the aftershocks of what happens when CEOs, professors, public servants, journalists and other leaders march from the elite university, which incubates radical and destructive ideas, into the elite institutions that govern culture. Moral relativism, careerism and a rejection of classical intellectual traditions rule the day.”

Tellez called the foundation “one part of the front line of the cultural battle in which we must all participate.” He said it “nurtures a broad network of friends that is dispersed throughout society, working diligently and quietly to bring about change.” And “unlike other academic reform initiatives, FEHE focuses directly on the moral formation of students.”

“FEHE focuses on working within—and reforming—the elite university, which is the key leverage point for cultural change today,” he said. This reforming appears to go beyond just the universities with programs listed in FEHE’s network. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s controversial new School of Civic Life and Leadership, for instance, has hired a cohort of faculty previously supported by FEHE entities.

Katie Chenoweth, an associate professor in Princeton’s Department of French and Italian who’s investigated FEHE, said that Tellez “basically says we cannot leave society in the hands of secular people.” The foundation’s intent, she said, is for culture to adhere to the most conservative interpretation of Catholic moral teaching.

FEHE didn’t provide interviews for this story and didn’t answer multiple written questions. Kelly Hanlon, who is both FEHE’s and Witherspoon’s operations director, wrote in an email that the foundation “is an educational, grant-making institution and does not have any political or religious affiliation nor does it fund policy work.” She also said, “FEHE and the Witherspoon Institute are independent organizations with distinct missions. They are governed by independent boards.”

To understand FEHE’s purpose, and what kind of “cultural leaders" it seeks to form, it helps to go back to its apparent beginnings—with a pair of programs in the Princeton community, spearheaded by Tellez and George with funding from Opus Dei.

A Princeton Pedigree

The origin story of FEHE, according to Gareth Gore’s recent book, Opus, begins in 1981, when Tellez left St. Louis—where he directed a residence for numeraries, celibate Opus Dei members like himself—for New York and took charge of what became the Clover Foundation. That foundation’s website says it focuses its “philanthropic efforts on organizations inspired by the Catholic Prelature of Opus Dei, promoting initiatives that align with our values and further the common good.” It would eventually help start a program at Princeton—one that would become part of the FEHE network and a model for others.

Gore reports that Tellez, whom he interviewed for the book, was “put in charge of youth programs—specifically a team charged with infiltrating the university sector.” An Opus Dei numerary and former Princeton University chaplain invited Tellez to the town of Princeton, where he met George. According to Gore, George and Tellez eventually cooked up the idea for the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. (George, who remained a trustee of FEHE as of 2023, didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for an interview.)

The James Madison Program was founded in 2000, with the Clover Foundation providing $30,000 in start-up money, according to Opus Dei’s website. Journalist Jane Mayer has reported that much more founding money—$525,000—came from the conservative John M. Olin Foundation. (Tellez still serves on the James Madison Program’s 24-member advisory board, alongside Kathy and Harlan Crow, the billionaire whose lavish gifts to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas have stirred controversy. The program hosts and funds speakers, visiting fellows and postdoctorates and has become known as a conservative hub; those seeking to create what eventually became Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life sought out George for guidance.)

The James Madison Program was, and remains, part of Princeton’s politics department. Tellez soon wanted to expand on it, Gore writes, but without departmental constraints. “Setting up a new institute would give Tellez and George complete control—and allow them to expand way beyond Princeton,” Gore writes. George, for his part, told Princeton Alumni Weekly that “a university shouldn’t have a think tank, just as such, within it.”

The Witherspoon Institute was founded in 2003 as an entity separate from the university, though it is just steps from Princeton’s campus. According to Gore, an Opus Dei nonprofit called the Higher Education Initiatives Foundation provided half a million dollars to Witherspoon in its first few years. Opus Dei, in a written response to Opus, said the Higher Education Initiatives Foundation “was the personal initiative of some members of Opus Dei. It has no formal relationship with Opus Dei.”

At the time of Witherspoon’s founding, gay rights activists were pushing to legalize same-sex marriage across the nation. Witherspoon pushed back. The institute published a booklet called Marriage and the Public Good: Ten Principles, which it said came out of “discussions that began in December 2004” at a Witherspoon convention that “brought together scholars from economics, history, law, philosophy, psychiatry, and sociology to share with each other the findings of their research on why marriage, understood as the permanent union of husband and wife, is in the public interest.”

In the report, the institute identified same-sex marriage as a threat and urged legislation to oppose it. Republican senator Sam Brownback cited it in Congress as he argued for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

The institute later funded new research on the issue: a controversial study by Mark Regnerus, a UT Austin sociology professor, that concluded children with gay parents may be disadvantaged in certain aspects as adults. In 2012, amid criticism from activists and other faculty, Regnerus told Inside Higher Ed, “no claims about causation were made” in his published paper. In 2016, another study found that only two “of the 248 children with homosexual mothers or fathers” in Regnerus’s study “had lived with homosexually partnered parents for their entire childhoods.”

Witherspoon’s website still links to Regnerus’s work, and the institute also funds CanaVox, an international network of reading groups on marriage and sexuality that defines marriage as an “exclusive union between one man and one woman.” It also offers free seminars for students from high school to the graduate level, such as the Natural Law and Public Affairs Seminar for undergraduates and grad students. George is the institute’s Herbert W. Vaughan Senior Fellow. Witherspoon’s latest IRS Form 990 shows it paid him $204,000 in 2023, putting him in the top three of the institute’s five highest-compensated employees.

George and Tellez were both founding board members of the National Organization for Marriage in 2007. Its original address was the same as Witherspoon’s. Also in 2007, Tellez became one of the first directors of the conservative group American Principles in Action. (It’s now known as the American Principles Project, and he’s no longer on the board.)

In 2012, FEHE was born. Gore describes it as part of Tellez’s decision “to target the next generation … after voters failed to engage with the message of the National Organization for Marriage and the American Principles Project.”

“We’re going to devote even more fully to the education of young men and women so that they themselves can take positions in public policy,” Tellez explained to Gore.

The Network

The James Madison Program and Witherspoon Institute became models for a wider network of institutes and programs now based on or nearby 14 elite university campuses. FEHE’s total expenses in 2023 were $10.3 million.

What does that money support? In its 2023 IRS report, FEHE said its network is “forming exceptional students through intellectual friendship, connecting them with each other and positioning them at key points of cultural influence in academia, law, politics, business, media, finance and medicine.” And it claimed a considerable reach: “In the past five years alone, our grantees have reached approximately 100,000 students and young scholars through 5,000 events and 217 for-credit courses.

FEHE lists 27 institutes or programs on its website, which it says is the most up-to-date source. A dozen who received a total of roughly $5.7 million in 2023, according to the foundation’s 2023 IRS filings, are listed in the chart above.

On its website, FEHE lists 15 other entities it additionally supports (see box below). But that doesn’t necessarily mean it directly funds those programs.

Lara Buchak, a Princeton philosophy professor and co-director of PRÉCIS—whose website says it fosters “philosophical and theological reflection on how we should live”—told Inside Higher Ed in an email that her program hasn’t received funding or fellows from FEHE. “They did help connect me to a donor (I knew their president, Luis Tellez, from my previous post at UC Berkeley) and they like what we are doing,” Buchak wrote. “I assume we are on the website because they want to advertise our existence to others.”

Hanlon, the FEHE operations director, told Inside Higher Ed in an email that the foundation provides the entities listed in its network with “funding and guidance—sometimes both, sometimes one or the other.”

The foundation’s 2023 IRS filings include a $804,000 expenditure on fellowships, but the foundation does not specify where those fellows are based. Many FEHE-supported fellows appear to move within the FEHE network.

The Morningside Institute—one of the organizations FEHE directly funds—hosts the Barry Center, which appears to be supported by John and Daria Barry, who are among FEHE’s major funders. The Barry Center’s online bios of its 2024–25 fellows shows many of their fellowships are at FEHE network entities: three at Princeton’s James Madison Program, two at Duke’s Civil Discourse Project, four at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, one at the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and one at the Zephyr Institute near Stanford. “FEHE plays no role in the identification or selection of fellows,” Hanlon wrote.

The Canterbury Institute, another part of the FEHE network, hosts the John and Daria Barry Foundation–supported Barry Scholarship, which pays for graduates of U.S. universities to pursue further study at the University of Oxford. And, though no UNC Chapel Hill–adjacent entities are listed in the FEHE network, its School of Civic Life and Leadership has become home to at least five former employees or fellows of FEHE network programs—including Jed Atkins, who led the Civil Discourse Project at Duke before becoming the School of Civic Life’s dean and director.

The network continues to grow. Among its recent projects is the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, an honorary and scholarly association that opened in 2023 with a name similar to the long-established American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. According to the academy’s website, its “activities are aimed at revitalizing intellectual life and restoring the intellectual rigor and diversity of American colleges, universities, and public intellectual discourse.”

The academy has inducted well-known scholars and authors who’ve advocated for free expression and in some cases received backlash for their speech: The Coddling of the American Mind co-author and Heterodox Academy board chairman Jonathan Haidt; Salman Rushdie; Steven Pinker; Henry Louis Gates Jr.; UNC Chapel Hill provost (and key School of Civic Life backer) Chris Clemens; National Institutes of Health director nominee (and COVID-19 restrictions critic) Jay Bhattacharya; and former longtime American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks among them.

Another honoree is someone who has been partnering with Tellez since before FEHE began: Robert George. The academy has given George, and about 20 others, $50,000 prizes each—the Barry Prizes for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement.

While those on the left might write off the foundation as a conservative operation, many might agree with Tellez’s diagnosis of how the decline of the humanities has harmed academe. In the 2022 speech ascribed to him, he said, “Education is presented as a way to promote economic gain, technological power or value-free models of ‘efficiency’ or ‘skills’ … As liberal learning becomes ordered toward careerist ends, the university curriculum has eroded its own ability to combat highly partisan or culturally destructive ideas with powerful and morally compelling historical narratives.”

To this problem, Tellez held up FEHE as a solution. “It could be said that FEHE embodies a catholic vision, broadly understood,” he said. “That is, it draws mainstream learning into conversation with the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition and cultivates reflection on the catholic, or universal, questions that animate every human life.”