Several prominent basketball coaches, including current and past college and professional coaches, released a letter last week denouncing the Trump administration for policies that (they say) undermine college athletics and the independence of colleges and universities.
“College sports unite us as a nation, drawing out team spirit and shared values of fair play,” the letter said. “Campuses—large and small, public and private, two- and four-year—are a bedrock foundation for the role sports play in American life. Protecting university independence safeguards this proud tradition.”
Notable signatories include Steve Kerr and Glenn “Doc” Rivers, current coaches (respectively) of the Golden State Warriors and the Milwaukee Bucks. Both are former accomplished players of the National Basketball Association as well. Kerr has garnered attention for his many criticisms of President Trump and his support for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives in businesses and universities.
In addition to Kerr and Rivers, coaches who have signed on include John Beilein (University of Michigan), Tom Amaker (Harvard), James Jones (Yale), and Judith Sweet, the past president of the National Collegiate Athletics Association and a leading consultant on “gender equity” issues. It is not a long list—less than twenty signatories in all—and is hardly representative of the several hundred current and former college and professional coaches who may have been asked but refused to endorse the document.
The letter goes on to claim,
Punitive cuts to research funds, censoring of curricula, intimidation of university leaders and faculty, and the deployment of federal enforcement officers on college grounds are dividing our campuses and detracting from teaching and learning. Unprecedented political pressure on colleges and universities undercuts the values we have sought to instill in student-athletes.
The letter was posted on the website of Stand for Campus Freedom, an organization that claims to be nonpartisan and nonpolitical, though such assertions are doubtful. The group appears instead to be a left-wing operation, closely tied to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, that obscures its political connections through the use of anodyne terms, such as academic freedom, sportsmanship, and institutional independence.
Stand for Campus Freedom is a project of Democracy House, a nonprofit linked to a sophisticated network of left-wing activist groups. The organization’s mission, according to its website, is to promote student political engagement through summer programs that train activists to monitor elections and organize registration drives. Democracy House works with other activist groups, including Scholars Strategy Network, All in Campus Democracy Challenge, and the Student Vote Research Network, to send representatives to college campuses to mobilize potential voters and train a new generation of activists. In 2023, the initiative began using federal work-study funds to pay college students to perform voter registration and encourage “civic engagement.”
Democracy House, in turn, is a subsidiary of the Foundation for Civic Leadership, an incubator for left-leaning voter-engagement projects targeting college students. The two operations share offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Foundation for Civic Leadership is also a sponsor of the All In Democracy Challenge and the Student Vote Research Network, mentioned above.
In 2015, the Foundation for Civic Leadership launched the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition to promote student voting and the diversity agenda in higher education. In that campaign, the organization formed a partnership with Young Invincibles, a far-left advocacy and lobbying operation based in Washington, D.C. This group, founded by the Obama aide Ari Matusiak, has lobbied for Medicaid expansion, Obama’s healthcare initiatives, cancellation of student debt, and Black Lives Matter. These organizations do not hide their affiliations with the Democratic Party, even though they are cloaked in the language of “democracy” and “civic engagement” and operated through a maze of interconnected not-for-profit and lobbying groups.
The chairman of both Democracy House and the Foundation for Civic Engagement is Ian Simmons, the cofounder of the Blue Haven Initiative, an “impact investing” firm that promotes back for climate-change projects and donates to various left-wing causes, including those mentioned above. Simmons is a generous donor to the Democratic Party and one of the original donors to Act Blue, the small-dollar Democratic fundraising operation now under investigation by the Justice Department. He happens to be married to Liesel Pritzker, a member of the prominent Pritzker family of Democratic donors and politicians. One of her cousins, J. B. Pritzker, is the governor of Illinois; another, Penny Pritzker, was the Secretary of Commerce under President Obama.
One doubts that the basketball coaches who signed the letter denouncing the Trump administration had any idea of the left-wing origins of the document or of the links of the sponsoring organization (Stand for Academic Freedom) to the activist wing of the Democratic Party. True enough, the letter does not mention Trump, though it makes obvious references to Trump’s policies in regard to immigration enforcement and to the withdrawal of federal research funds to major universities that have run afoul of civil-rights laws. There is no question that the Trump administration is destroying “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracies at colleges and universities, all of them operated by Democratic loyalists. It should not have taken much thought on the part of these coaches to see that they were being beguiled into a partisan attack.
By coincidence, the letter came out just a few days before President Trump hosted a White House meeting with several dozen academic and business leaders for the purpose of “saving college sports.” Nick Saban, the former football coach at the University of Alabama, sat two seats away from President Trump. Urban Meyer, the former football coach at Florida and Ohio State, also attended the meeting, along with Charlie Baker, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, and Pete Bevacqua, the athletic director at Notre Dame. The wide-ranging discussion addressed several problems with college athletics, including especially how and to what extent players should be compensated. In typical fashion, President Trump promised at the end of the meeting to issue an executive order that will solve all of the concerns that were raised.
President Trump thus upstaged Kerr, Rivers, and the other coaches who signed onto the open letter by simultaneously assembling a prestigious group of academic and business leaders to address real problems in university athletics that cut across party lines. Their letter appears puny and pathetic in comparison, attracting few signatures and further discredited by the hyper-partisan origins of the document.
