Every year, well-meaning donors pour hundreds of millions of dollars into America’s most prestigious universities. They do so out of sentiment, prestige, or the vague hope that their alma mater will preserve the civilization it once championed. But in 2025, this is delusion. The modern university—especially the Ivy League—is a machine built to erase the memory of the old world, not preserve it. Donors aren’t saving the institutions they love: they’re financing their own irrelevance.
To understand what was lost, one need only look back to the Ivy League of the 1940s, an era in which fraternal culture was not simply an appendage of undergraduate life, but a central organ of elite formation in America.
In those years, the great colleges—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia—still retained the trappings of their founding: small, WASP-dominated, semi-clerical institutions filled with the Yankee elite. But the real crucibles of influence were not the classrooms. They were the clubs, the societies, and the houses.
The great final clubs of Harvard, the eating clubs of Princeton, the secret societies of Yale—these were more than social diversions. They were incubators of elite consensus. Membership in such circles conferred a kind of spiritual citizenship in the American governing class. Men were trained to speak in a certain tone, carry themselves in a certain way, and, above all, recognize one another across institutions and borders. It was a culture that, for better or worse, assumed the right to rule.
From this soil sprang the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence agency that would become the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. The OSS was not a democratic organization, nor was it meant to be. It was staffed disproportionately by Ivy League graduates—often from the very clubs and fraternities described above. At Yale, the scrolls of Skull and Bones read like a roll call of early intelligence officers; at Harvard and Princeton, it was understood that certain professors and club men had been “tapped” for service.
OSS founder General Bill Donovan, a member of the Columbia Class of 1905, explicitly sought out men of “imagination, daring, and a sense of honor.” In practice, this meant the cultivated sons of America’s eastern seaboard: gentlemen with a classical education, a family crest, and a willingness to operate in the shadows. Fraternal culture in this period functioned as an informal vetting apparatus, a kind of soft intelligence service within the Ivy League itself.
It is difficult now—amid the bureaucracy, the credentialism, the ideological policing of the modern university—to convey just how much informal authority such organizations once held. They were not beholden to the university. Their properties were privately owned; their funding came from loyal alumni; and their culture, though certainly elitist, was governed by an ethic of duty, self-restraint, and discretion.
In many ways, the American state of the mid-20th century—its diplomacy, intelligence, and finance—was administered by men who had first learned to govern each other within these tightly knit collegiate orders. They were not perfect. But they were theirs. And they produced results: they won wars, built institutions, and upheld a kind of continuity between generations.
Today, that world is gone. Its physical remnants—houses, clubs, libraries—still stand. But the culture has been ceded to universities that neither respect it nor understand its utility. The modern donor, eager to see his name on a building, throws his wealth into the maw of DEI bureaucracies and administrative bloat, absurdly hoping to buy prestige from institutions that despise him.
Though left-wing rot has been pervasive in our elite institutions for decades, the extent to which these institutions have deteriorated has become apparent to most wealthy, right-wing alumni in the post-COVID era. The natural response for many has been to cease donating to universities altogether, shifting their giving to think tanks and Republican politicians who call for the gutting of administrative bloat at elite universities.
Don’t get me wrong: targeting corrupt, inefficient, and anti-Western university administrations is an important task. The actions taken by the Trump Administration against Harvard, Columbia, and others have been a welcome step in the right direction.
What’s lost in all this talk of “fixing higher ed,” however, is that the university’s true engine isn’t the bloated administration or even the faculty—it’s the students. A captured student body guarantees a captured future. Reforming it doesn’t mean only tweaking syllabi or cutting DEI budgets. It means reshaping campus culture at the root. And that means institutions—private, funded, selective, and masculine—dedicated to forming future elites.
Imagine if instead of funding another sterile “Institute for Western Civilization,” whose director gets fired within five years, a donor acquired property two blocks from Harvard Yard and founded a serious organization for ambitious young men. A place for conversation, strategy, loyalty, and leadership. Not a keg pit or cosplay aristocracy, but something with real social gravity and staying power. A kind of modern Cliveden set—except this time, one at every Ivy in America.
Broadly defined, fraternities have always held this potential. Not the Greek-letter organizations that have long since sold out to HR departments and alumni fundraising boards, but true fraternal institutions: semiprivate spaces where students live, think, and train together over years. These places are power incubators. They build loyalty, memory, hierarchy, and taste—four things the modern university actively suppresses.
In the German-speaking world, a perfect blueprint already exists: the Burschenschaften.
These fraternal orders, many of them tracing an unbroken lineage back to the early 19th century, have survived revolutions, regimes, and academic hostility for one simple reason: they are wholly independent. Had they remained tethered to the universities themselves, they would have been extinguished decades ago by the same bureaucratic entropy that devours all dissent in the academic sphere.
Instead, they persist because they are funded by their own men. Membership is not a youthful phase but a lifelong covenant. The elder brethren—often figures of considerable influence in law, business, and public life—sustain the houses financially and steward the young through patronage and placement. The system is not merely one of mutual aid, but of deliberate succession.
I was recently in Vienna, and a friend extended an invitation to the Wiener Akademikerball—a jewel in the city’s storied ball season. That evening in the Hofburg Palace, I encountered something rare in modern Europe: the open presence of fraternity men from across Austria and Germany, mingling with politicians, businessmen, and intellectuals, all bound by shared custom and a sense of inherited duty. All willing to help one another.
In elite environments, real estate is power. Anyone who’s spent time on an Ivy campus knows the gravitational force of a well-located house. Institutions with land and legacy can shape a culture; rootless student groups cannot. On campuses where it’s nearly impossible to acquire property, a single house can carry clout far beyond its square footage. And yet how many right-leaning donors have even considered this route? How many have prioritized shaping the next generation over getting their name on the wall of an art history wing?
If you want to preserve something, you need to invest in continuity—and continuity requires brotherhood, not bureaucracies. You don’t need to reinvent the university. You need to build the thing next to it, outside its reach, where the real future is formed.
Don’t give $20 million to a university that thinks white men are evil. Give it to a house. A real one. Fill it with ten of the best young men you can find. Pay their rent. Feed them. Teach them. Give them books and a door that locks. Watch what happens.
If even a handful of serious donors did this, we’d have an elite that remembers who it is—and what it’s for—within a generation.
The new aristocracy—if one is to be born—will not be created in boardrooms. It will be built in living rooms, over cigars, late at night, in houses just off campus, where real friendships are formed and future plans are made.
If older donors really want to push back against the flood of anti-Western poison pouring out of elite institutions post-1964, they must wake up to a simple truth: winning means backing smart, ambitious young men. It means real mentorship, not just writing checks for another diversity-themed atrium.
A century ago, secret societies flourished by maintaining institutional power through connections in government, industry, and diplomacy. Older members would help put younger members on a fast track to elite positions.
Look at how the Germans do it. Their fraternal orders have lasted for centuries because older members take care of the younger ones, and the younger ones grow into leaders. That’s the model. That’s how you build a legacy that doesn’t crumble after the next faculty meeting.
The Burschenschaften wielded real power. Their hardcore nationalism was so threatening to the multiethnic Austrian Empire that Klemens von Metternich outlawed the fraternities in Austria in the 1819 Carlsbad Decrees. Their secrecy and fraternal structure are what made them powerful. Similar organizations existed across the West—Skull and Bones at Yale, Bullingdon at Oxford. In their heyday, these fraternal organizations shaped history.
If you want to preserve what built the West, stop funding the people tearing it down. Fund the future—back existing networks, raise your own. Otherwise, you’re just buying your name on a building that’ll be renamed in ten years.
History has proven that these societies can have extraordinary influence. With the right backing, we can build an elite class of ambitious, pedigreed young men who want to take their country back.