This public college was taken over by the far-right—a warning for the future of higher ed

Don and Melinda Crawford // UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

This public college was taken over by the far-right—a warning for the future of higher ed

A few years ago, Sunnie Helling decided to get serious about sobriety. She moved into the Union Gospel Mission, a religious charity in her hometown of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, that helps unhoused people get back on their feet. She began to plan a better life for herself and her two daughters. “I knew I wanted to get my GED,” she said. She also knew that the Adult Education Center at North Idaho College (NIC) offered a free GED program. It seemed like a good place to start.

Helling is now just five credits away from graduating from NIC with a General Studies degree. But it’s possible the college won’t exist when it comes time for commencement. By next April, NIC may lose accreditation, leaving the Idaho Panhandle without a single state institution of higher education.

The charter violations that kicked off this accreditation scandal four years ago never had anything to do with academics. The two-year community college offers a solid education and features the top nursing program in the state. Their finances are stable too. No, NIC might go under because the board of trustees has existed in a state of toxicity, chaos, and dysfunction ever since the far right gained a board majority four years ago, report Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Teen Vogue and Lux Magazine.

It is difficult to overstate how catastrophic disaccreditation would be for the people of North Idaho. With a price tag 65 percent lower on average than four-year state institutions, community colleges place higher education within reach of the least advantaged Americans; over a third of their students make less than $20,000 per year. At NIC, 57 percent of students receive financial aid. Local businesses depend on the college for employee training on everything from office software to forklift operation. High school students can enroll in dual credit programs, which let students get a head start on their first year of college and allow homeschoolers to obtain official transcripts.

If NIC goes under, students will either need to pay out-of-state tuition in nearby Spokane, Washington, move south, or abandon their aspirations of higher education. Idaho is enormous; you could fit 17 Connecticuts within its borders. And yet, while Connecticut has 12 community colleges, Idaho has only four. “Our community colleges are named by cardinal directions for a reason,” the college’s current president, Nick Swayne, said. “Losing one would be just traumatic.”

The loss would be traumatic for Coeur d’Alene as well. An independent analysis commissioned by the city found that the local economy would take a $60 million hit and shed 1,300 jobs. NIC’s performing arts center serves as a gathering place and conference location. The college is more than a school; it is a key institution within the community. And yet, if the board of trustees cannot get its act together—and soon—the institution as it exists today will vanish.

Path to possible extinction

How could this happen? The problem goes far beyond a three-person majority on the trustee board of a small community college. NIC and many other institutions are in danger because, over the past decade and a half, a core group of extremists has slowly taken over the Idaho Republican Party in the same way that a parasitic wasp slowly takes over its host. This required no astroturfing or Koch-fueled cash infusions, just a regular, everyday indifference to hyperlocal politics. The tactic is underway elsewhere, but Idaho got a head start. This crisis is what happens when insurgency bears fruit.

NIC’s accreditation troubles began in 2020, but the events that led to those troubles began all the way back in 1964—the last time Idaho voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, when arch-conservative Barry Goldwater lost in a rout. Ronald Rankin, one of the architects of Goldwater’s campaign in Orange County, California, moved to Coeur d’Alene a few months later with the express intent of transforming the sparsely populated, mostly white state into a bastion of hardcore conservatism. Richard Butler, a white supremacist also from California, followed suit in the 1970s when he built his Aryan Nations compound just north of the city. For the next several decades, cheap land, fertile soil, and the promise of a like-minded community attracted both conservatives and white nationalists, a trend that accelerated as the state’s politics moved increasingly rightward. Between 1970 and 2020, the population of Kootenai County, where Coeur d’Alene is located, quadrupled. Idaho experienced the second-largest population increase of any state in 2022, and one of every three of these new Idahoans hails from California.

The Tea Party backlash to Barack Obama’s election pushed the state’s transition into high gear. In 2009, Spokane transplant Ron Lahr formed a group he called the Reagan Republicans, which began to run explicitly partisan candidates for nonpartisan positions. They ran into very little resistance. “These board positions—state council, school board—rarely did anybody step up,” Christie Wood, former NIC board member and current city councilperson, said. “They’re unpaid. They take a lot of your time. It’s really just about someone who likes a government meeting. That’s me. I love a government meeting.”

Wood, a retired police officer, grew up in Kootenai County. She was elected in 2004 to the NIC board of trustees, a nonpartisan body tasked with overseeing college operations but strictly forbidden from influencing academic policy or day-to-day operations. For the next seven years, that’s exactly what they did.

Downward spiral takes hold

Things started getting weird in 2012, when Lahr’s Reagan Republicans endorsed local investment banker Todd Banducci for trustee. “The current NIC board of trustees have raised tax rates in Kootenai County by 107% since 2007,” the endorsement read. “Kootenai County deserves a conservative change.” Banducci also promised to review “policies and procedures” on course offerings. “It must be determined if the mission of NIC is properly stated and defined, and if that mission is being accomplished,” Banducci wrote in a candidate profile in the Coeur d’Alene Press.

The chaos began almost immediately, Wood said. Banducci violated open meeting laws in an effort to end tenure and reacted poorly when Wood pushed back. A broad-shouldered man who stands over six feet tall, Banducci once stood up and shouted at Wood, “I ought to take you outside right now and kick your ass!” Another time, after an acrimonious budget meeting, he told her his wife was “going to bitch slap you,” Wood recalls.

In response to an email detailing the incidents recounted in this article, Banducci said it was “full of inaccuracies and things that have been demonstrably proven false.” He did not provide specific rebuttals but sent several articles from the local press, including an interview with the student newspaper where he talked about his good relationships with student groups, and said that his efforts on the board had been about exercising proper oversight. His opponents, he said, were using the accreditation issue as a “political weapon”: “Don’t rock the boat, don’t create waves, don’t take any action or do anything that they don’t like or they’ll take accreditation.”

Banducci’s alleged behavior became a more serious concern in 2019, when a long-time employee accused him of physical assault. The board handled this allegation with an “informal resolution,” according to a 2020 letter from the rest of the members to Banducci. The letter also notes “a number of these past situations where [Banducci’s] actions were perceived to be threatening, intimidating, and/or rude.”

A couple months later, Wood said, she received a call. “You wait till November,” she recalls Banducci telling her. “We’re gonna win this election, and then you guys are gonna pay.”

In 2020, two new trustees, Greg McKenzie and Michael Barns, were elected to the board on a platform of reducing costs, ending mask mandates, and ending diversity programs at the college.

This new majority made Banducci board chair, and his behavior escalated. Then-college president Rick MacLennan told the board in 2021 that he had witnessed Banducci physically assault a college employee and that Banducci had confronted an employee about donating to his campaign opposition. Also according to MacLennan, Banducci complained when the NIC student president omitted “under God” from the pledge of allegiance. (In his email, Banducci said “Depending on the veracity of Christie [Wood] and Rick is a questionable strategy in light of their challenges w/remembering conversations, events, and facts accurately.”) Emails obtained by a local human rights group show that Banducci got involved on behalf of a student who accused his professor of anti-conservative discrimination (his final grade in the class was 89.5 percent). “I’m battling the NIC ‘deep state’ on an almost daily basis,” Banducci wrote the student in January 2021. “The liberal progressives are quite deeply entrenched.”

MacLennan wrote that Banducci had “indicated that he and I would be meeting more frequently for him to give me my ‘marching orders.'” MacLennan said that when he reminded Banducci that “marching orders” fell outside board authority, Banducci reminded MacLennan that the board has the authority to fire the college president. In August 2021, after a Covid surge prompted the president to instate a mask mandate, the board repealed it and then, a month later, followed through on Banducci’s implied threat and fired him without cause (MacLennan sued the college for wrongful termination and agreed to a $500,000 settlement).

In February, faculty and staff assemblies passed motions of no confidence and called for Banducci to step down as chair, citing “particular concern” over his “treatment of women.” Over 60 women in the community published an open letter calling for Banducci to resign. That same month, local human rights groups filed an official complaint with both the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and the school’s accrediting body, Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU), arguing that the board had violated academic freedom and nondiscrimination ordinances. The NWCCU looked into the complaints and required NIC to submit a plan to fix certain issues. When the board failed to adhere to that plan, NWCCU began to escalate its response: ad-hoc reports, warning letters, and, finally, a warning sanction in April 2022.

Banducci and McKenzie responded by declaring the entire situation overblown. In an article for the NIC’s Sentinel, Banducci accused “the established, entrenched elites” of weaponizing board rules and using the accreditation threat as a cudgel to stop them from enacting needed reforms. McKenzie compared the situation to the “Russia collusion hoax” in an article he wrote for The People’s Pen, a far-right mailer that pushes theories of election fraud and urges a state takeover of federal land. He also framed it as a backroom struggle, writing, “It seems Wood would rather burn down NIC than give up power.” (McKenzie did not respond to a request for comment.)

High hopes detoured

Despite, or thanks to, resignations and reshufflings, the board managed to hire Nick Swayne as college president that year, a major step forward in fulfilling NWCCU’s baseline requirements for maintaining accreditation. Swayne came into the position with high hopes. As a native Idahoan and retired lieutenant colonel with 22 years of experience in higher education, he was highly qualified and anything but a stereotypical liberal academic. “I figured, [Banducci] may not like me initially, but I think I can come in and bridge that gap,” he recalled thinking at the time. “I was wrong.”

In November 2022, Kootenai County voters once again gave Banducci a three-person majority, which placed Swayne on administrative leave a month after assuming office. NIC was now on its fifth president in less than 15 months. A few months later, the NWCCU gave NIC an ultimatum: If the school couldn’t get its act together by April 2025, it would lose accreditation.

There are signs the school might be able to recover. After successfully suing the board, Swayne was able to resume his presidency in June. Multiple NIC staff members and local activists said Swayne helped restore morale amongst the faculty and staff. Another far-right-endorsed candidate took over as board chair, but he’s proved more measured. The board hired outside accreditation experts to help with the remediation process, and Swayne says it’s going well. He is cautiously optimistic about NIC’s future. “I definitely think there’s a chance,” he said.

At first glance, the NIC accreditation crisis looks like yet another conservative attack on institutions that teach ideas they don’t like. But NIC is not the New College in Florida, the small liberal arts college Ron DeSantis targeted for takeover. It is not some infamously radical institution like Evergreen State, where student protesters shut down campus over a white professor’s resistance to a diversity event. It is a community college that offers mostly technical degrees in a county where registered Democrats comprise 10 percent of the population. Christa Hazel, a NIC alum and founder of the citizen’s watchdog group SaveNIC, put it: “Who is for woke right now in North Idaho?”

As it turns out, the NIC accreditation crisis is not really a campus culture war. This is a war for Kootenai County, for Idaho, and possibly for America. The weapon, weirdly enough, is boredom.

Anatomy of a takeover

There are 73 voting precincts in Kootenai County and nearly 1,000 in Idaho. Every two years, the Republicans in these precincts elect a precinct committeeman: an unpaid position that mostly involves electioneering but also votes on party platform and selects a county chairman. Idaho’s 44 county chairmen then vote for the Idaho state chairman, who can shape nearly every aspect of the party’s platform and strategy through committee appointments.

Most people don’t know or care about precinct committeemen, so nobody really noticed when groups like Lahr’s Reagan Republicans began to recruit people who aligned with their values to run for the position. By the mid-2010s, though, the Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF) had emerged as the most powerful engine behind the takeover. The foundation, which describes itself as a free market think tank, explicitly opposes almost every type of government funding, all “redistribution of wealth,” and anything that might “promote the breakdown of the traditional family” by “incentivizing degeneracy.”

But nothing has drawn the ire of the IFF like public education. Thanks to IFF-backed politicians, school funding initiatives can only appear on the ballot twice a year, and schools cannot fully explain why more funding is needed without running into restrictive, IFF-backed anti-electioneering laws. In 2021, a student accused Boise State of anti-conservative harassment in a diversity course. An independent investigation found no evidence of harassment or indoctrination, but, in a move the IFF takes credit for, the Idaho legislature nevertheless cut a total of $2.5 million from university budgets and passed a bill that targets “Critical Race Theory.” The “education” section of the IFF’s website contains over 100 articles, almost all of which attack state education in some way.

In 2016, committeemen elected IFF chair Brent Regan as Kootenai County Chair. For years, the foundation had produced a “Freedom Index,” which rates elected officials based on how closely their votes adhere to IFF ideology. Regan’s joint chairmanship meant the Freedom Index now had the official backing of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee (KCRCC). The foundation began to mass-mail postcards with the IFF’s picks for down-ballot races beneath the KCRCC logo. Many voters welcomed a cheat sheet that would spare them the drudgery of researching obscure candidates for obscure positions. The campaign’s ongoing success meant that politicians had to pay careful attention to their Freedom Index score, lest they find themselves replaced on the party mailer by candidates more amenable to the IFF agenda. (The Reagan Republicans, which originally endorsed Banducci, overlap significantly in purpose with the IFF and several other right-wing political groups in Idaho. Banducci is “rated and vetted” by the KCRCC.)

The IFF has no problem endorsing candidates with robust connections to white nationalists and far-right militias. State Representative Heather Scott, who had the highest Freedom Index score in 2022, took an active part in Ammon Bundy’s occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Janice McGeachin, Idaho’s former lieutenant governor and IFF darling, spoke at white supremacist Nick Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) in 2022. In 2021, the IFF endorsed Dave Reilly, an antisemitic extremist who promoted the Unite the Right rally, for the Post Falls school board. “I believe Dave is a good man who will make an excellent Trustee and will resist the Progressive/Marxist indoctrination of our children,” Regan said of Reilly. The candidate lost, but just barely—he walked away with 47 percent of the vote. The IFF later hired him as a communications strategist (it’s not clear if he is still working with them).

As these connections with extremists increased, instances of reported intimidation became more common. According to the Idaho Statesman, nine candidates for state offices say they received threats or harassment in 2022; several of them withdrew from their races as a result. Hazel says she has been stalked, her family doxxed, and that the white supremacist group Patriot Front has conducted training exercises in front of her home. The ongoing harassment has taken a toll. “You’re constantly having to look over your shoulder,” she said. 

By 2022, the IFF had the votes to purge the Republican Party state leadership and elect Dorothy Moon, a former teacher with connections to the John Birch Society and Ammon Bundy’s antigovernment protests, as state party chair, where she got to work tightening her faction’s grip over state politics. In 2023, she established party tribunals able to censure any politician whose votes do not conform to the party platform. Last March, one such tribunal voted to strip Republican affiliation from State Representative Stephanie Mickelson after censuring her twice for the high crime of voting against a school voucher program, voting in favor of funding higher education, and against censorious library bills. This level of party control is unprecedented in the United States. To keep their jobs, Idaho Republicans must now privilege an agenda imposed from on high over the interests of the people who elected them.

Beyond the walls of higher education

The consequences of that agenda go far beyond NIC’s accreditation crisis. Idaho’s abortion laws are among the strictest in the country; citing difficulty recruiting doctors given the risk of criminalization, two hospitals have already closed their labor and delivery departments, leaving many rural Idahoans hours from maternal care. Armed militia members have shown up in the children’s section of libraries looking for pornography, and libraries are limiting service due to legislation that holds librarians criminally liable for books deemed inappropriate. Idaho’s primary and secondary schools are literally falling apart; it spends less per student than any other state and ranks 43rd in education quality.

On a Sunday in June, in a packed auditorium on NIC’s campus, the Idaho Republican Party finalized its platform for the next two years—the one politicians have to follow, or else. The platform now calls for making IVF illegal. It demands that the governor call upon the National Guard to expel undocumented migrants.

The platform also now opposes “using taxpayer funding for programs beyond high school.”

During floor debate, supporters asserted that their only target was Idaho LAUNCH—a program that provides vocational training—and not higher education writ large. A proposal to explicitly reference Idaho LAUNCH in the platform, however, was shot down. The bill passed, and Banducci, who is also a precinct committeeman, stood with the majority. “Once it’s part of the platform in such a general way, then it allows for them to censure members of the legislature who do support higher education,” Swayne said.

Could the GOP actually defund higher education? An Idaho political scientist, who requested that neither his name nor institution be used for fear of direct reprisal, said, “Do they want to defund higher education? I would argue yes.” Could they actually pull it off? “I don’t think so.” The economic and political hurdles are extremely high. “[People] like all the stuff higher ed does. They like watching Boise football,” he said. Businesses would also likely resist it: “If you want a strong private sector, you need an educated workforce.” Moon’s tribunals could overcome some of this resistance, he conceded, but it would still be a slog. The real danger is that Idaho will continue to do what they’re already doing: using the excuse of DEI and Marxist indoctrination to steadily decrease university budgets and erode university quality. Even if Republicans manage to eliminate public funding, colleges will likely continue to operate. But “there would probably be a push to try privatizing higher ed,” he said.

Some city council members were so worried about the possibility of a push to sell NIC to a private bidder that in September, they rezoned the land in and around the school to require that it be used only for public higher education.

IFF rhetoric over the years suggests that privatization might be their ideal outcome. “I don’t think government should be in the education business. It is the most virulent form of socialism (and indoctrination thereto) in America today,” IFF president and executive director Wayne Hoffman wrote in 2019. Officially, the IFF does not seek to get rid of public education entirely. “There will probably always be traditional public schools—and we should work to improve them,” Boise State political science professor Scott Yenor wrote on the IFF website in June.

But the word “probably” contains a hyperlink that leads to a different, off-site article, co-written by Yenor in 2023. The essay, titled “Education: How to Destroy and Reconquer,” provides a detailed plan for dismantling the public education system and replacing it with conservative institutions. “Experiments in alternative accreditation should be tried, as should seed money for student loan-free public universities,” the authors write. The essay calls for the gradual end of all government sources of funding until, eventually, “public opinion reaches a boiling point” and state schools can be replaced by conservative “flagship universities” that inculcate morality, eliminate literature and social sciences, and emphasize physical fitness.

Yenor’s coauthor, Arthur Milikh, is the executive director of Claremont Institute’s Washington D.C. branch, and Yenor has a fellowship there. The Claremont Institute, which helped shape Trump’s first term, is listed as a member of the advisory board of Project 2025. When Yenor and Milikh wrote this article, the NIC accreditation crisis was well into its third year. If their essay is a blueprint for the destruction of modern education, NIC might be the drawing board.

Bottom line: Students’ needs matter most

It all sounds far-fetched. A lot of things do before they happen. “I am constantly pondering if a boiling frog knows—at some point, do they question, is it getting warm in here?” Hazel said. “Or do they just never know?”

When Sunnie Helling first walked into the adult education center at NIC, the employees took time to get to know her, then connected her with the Center for New Directions, a program that helps single parents further their careers and educations. Eventually, the NIC program staff convinced her to give higher education a try. “[They] walked me through everything,” she said. “I almost didn’t do it. I was a little nervous. But there was a scholarship, and they helped me with filling out FAFSA.”

“Congress can end all student loan programs and should not guarantee any private loans for higher education,” Yenor and Milikh wrote in their antipublic education manifesto. “Congress should tax university endowments instead of pretending that universities are anything but big businesses that harm the common good while defrauding the taxpayer and creating a pseudo-intellectual revolutionary class that agitates against the country.”

Helling acclimated to NIC life quickly. She loved her classes, especially interpersonal communications. “[It] changed the way I speak,” she said. “They taught us about different cultures and subcultures. I never really gave a thought about how different people live their lives, even just in the United States.” She got a part-time job at the Adult Education Center. The Center for New Directions helped her navigate personal hardships and find scholarships that allowed her to attend college full-time and graduate debt-free.

Helling hopes to stay in the area and continue to pursue her education. “It kind of sounds cliché, but I hope I can work with others. I’ve looked into sociology,” she said. She has also considered working full-time at the Adult Education Center. “Because I’ve gone through the process, maybe once people get their GED, I can help them enroll,” she said.

“Many disciplines in higher education simply cannot be reformed and must be eliminated,” Yenor and Milikh declared. “Disciplines like sociology and social work must be jettisoned from public universities.”

“North Idaho College has led me to where I am,” Helling said. “I have an apartment for the first time for my daughters, and they have everything they need.” She’s learned enough to help her daughters with their homework. Her confidence has increased. “Working here, I never feel the need to ever go back to using.”

Helling was asked what she thought would happen if NIC lost accreditation. “Honestly, I’d be heartbroken,” she said. “I hope they get it together because I know if it’s changed my life, it’s going to change other people’s.”

Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Teen Vogue and Lux Magazine.

This story was produced by Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Teen Vogue and Lux Magazine, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.