The leader of a federal scholarship program that is supposed to be nonpartisan but instead overwhelmingly doles out the prestigious $30,000 awards to liberal-leaning students over conservative ones should resign, one education watchdog argues.
Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank in Washington D.C., said the executive secretary who oversees the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation refuses to acknowledge the lopsided results — even in the face of a congressional inquiry.
In particular, a three-page letter the foundation’s leader Terry Babcock-Lumish penned to the House Education and the Workforce Committee basically shrugged off lawmakers’ concerns that the annual award is given nearly exclusively to students involved in liberal-leaning causes, Hess told The College Fix in a recent telephone interview.
“This was a weak and feckless response,” Hess said, “…that I would think demands a resignation.”
Hess said the nonpartisan federal program was designed to raise up civic leaders who build bridges and promote dialogue — instead it’s being used to subsidize leftist activists on the taxpayers’ dime.
“Rather than simply acknowledging the problem, [Babcock-Lumish] is throwing every kind of defense and excuse against the wall,” Hess told The Fix about her response to Congress. “It shows a profound lack of leadership for a program that should be helping a polarized nation.”
Babcock-Lumish declined an interview request from The College Fix to address concerns raised by Hess and the workforce committee.
“This is a very busy time of year, when we open the annual competition and encourage America’s most promising young leaders from across the country and across the political spectrum to learn about the Truman Scholarship,” she said via email. “Just as the Truman Foundation’s mission remains unchanged since our founding by bipartisan admirers of President Truman in 1975, my answer remains unchanged: we select the best students who choose to apply for the award.”
In an exclusive statement provided to The College Fix, Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina who co-chairs the Education and the Workforce Committee, said she is also disappointed by Babcock-Lumish’s response to lawmakers’ concerns that tax dollars are being misused.
“For years, Truman Scholarships have been used as a pipeline for the next generation of left-leaning unelected bureaucrats and it’s past time to change that; unfortunately, Dr. Babock-Lumish has continuously downplayed legitimate concerns about partisan bias in the program,” Foxx said.
“The first step is for those at the top to acknowledge the problem, and that’s why the Committee will continue to shine a light on the anti-conservative bias at the Truman Foundation,” she said.
Truman scholars overwhelmingly lean left, research finds
Operating as an independent, executive branch agency, the Truman foundation was established by Congress as a federal memorial to President Harry Truman. Federal statute dictates that the foundation award scholarships to students who “demonstrate outstanding potential for and who plan to pursue a career in public service.
The first scholarships were handed out in the 1970s and more than 3,500 have been awarded in total. Recipients use the funds to pay for graduate school in a field related to public service, and must serve three of their first seven years after graduation in public service.
In the last four decades, it has become one of America’s most competitive scholarship programs. But in recent years, grumblings emerged that conservative students were not being selected as recipients.
In 2015, The College Fix launched an annual investigative project to determine the political and ideological bent of the winners of the $30,000 grants, using a combination of recipients’ official biographies, self-reported work histories on LinkedIn, and social media profiles and posts.
The Fix’s overall results to date have found that of 380 winners with known political affiliations — 93 percent lean left.
Those results mirror research conducted by Hess and AEI, published in May, which found that from 2021 to 2023, only a total of six Truman scholars were found to have expressed an interest in conservative causes.
“Of the 182 Truman scholars, 74 cite interest in at least one progressive issue, while just six note interest in a conservative issue. And the half dozen with an interest in conservative issues aren’t necessarily particularly right leaning,” the report noted.
Hess, in the report, called on elected officials to ensure that recruitment and selection reflects “a pool of applicants true to the nation’s breadth of perspectives, views, and values.”
‘We have no knowledge of applicants’ ideological orientations’
In May, the GOP-led House Education and the Workforce Committee sent a letter to Babcock-Lumish seeking answers.
“We are alarmed that an allegedly non-partisan award displays such a stark partisan tilt,” it stated. “…We refuse to believe that only liberal students demonstrate ‘outstanding potential’ in public service.”
“…However, if the Truman Scholarship functions as a career booster solely for students of a particular political persuasion, it should no longer be worthy of Congressional support, taxpayer funding, or its exalted public image.”
Babcock-Lumish responded in a three-page letter to lawmakers that Truman scholars are simply “reflective of the pool of candidates before us,” as faculty advisors at universities nationwide are the ones who nominate candidates.
She also wrote that during “the application and interview process, we have no knowledge of applicants’ ideological orientations, unless they explicitly share them.”
She argued the AEI study was not reliable because it could not be “replicated,” described it as specious, and accused it of ignoring “that most applicants are neither obviously progressive nor obviously conservative.”
“We do not and would not ask applicants to choose a side. Rather, we are focused on candidates looking for practical solutions to improve their communities, our nation, and our world. It is a needlessly divisive interpretation of incomplete data to suggest that students should sort themselves to one side or another ideologically and then remain there forever,” Babcock-Lumish wrote.
She added that if “we witnessed discrimination, we would put an immediate stop to it, regardless of whether it was viewpoint based or otherwise.”
Right-leaning students ‘do not feel like it’s a level playing field’
Hess, in his interview with The College Fix, said Babcock-Lumish’s response was disingenuous that a candidate’s ideological orientations are not known, because it’s not rocket science to determine that based on the particular causes listed on their resumes and biographies.
Even so, the AEI report was “very precise” in its language, Hess said: “We say it’s students with an interest in left-leaning or right-leaning or centrist policy issues.”
The reason this issue even came to the attention of AEI, Hess said, was because some people involved in the Truman foundation on all levels — from faculty advisors to members of its advisory committees to students interviewed but not selected — have voiced frustration that the majority of decision makers are biased in favor of left-leaning students and causes.
“They do not feel like it’s a level playing field,” Hess said, adding students in particular who have been passed over told him they could tell “there were right or wrong answers” to some judges during interviews.
“They did not feel like it was a culture where every idea was going to be treated fairly,” he said.
MORE: Colleges, experts disagree on why taxpayer-funded Truman Scholarships skew liberal
IMAGE: Truman Scholarship Foundation
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