COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy.

They are finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas. These initiatives, like the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas, Austin, or a project at the University of Colorado here in Colorado Springs, to publish a book of classic texts, are mostly financed by conservative organizations and donors, run by conservative professors and often referred to informally by supporters as conservative centers. But they have a decidedly nonpartisan and nonideological face.

Their goal is to restore what conservative and other critics see as leading casualties of the campus culture wars of the 1980s and’ 90s — the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of American history.

“These are not ideological courses,” said James Piereson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which created the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to funnel donations to these sorts of projects. The initiatives are only political insofar as they “work against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class studies, and postmodernism in general,” Piereson said.

The programs and centers differ in emphasis, with some concentrating on American democratic and capitalist institutions and others on the Western canon, the great books often derided during the culture wars as the history of “dead white men.”

Some, like the effort in Colorado Springs and the Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Virginia, focus solely on exposing freshmen to classical thinkers. Others favor a return to a more traditional teaching of America’s past, featuring its greatest accomplishments instead of the history of repression and exploitation that had been the trend.

Veritas has spent $2.5 million to support existing centers or create new ones on 10 campuses. In April, it received a $1 million matching grant.

Colorado Springs used its $50,000 grant to publish “A Free Society and Its Challenges,” a collection of classic writings including Plato’s “Apology” and The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” Every incoming freshman last fall and this fall was assigned readings from it.

According to a list drawn up by the National Association of Scholars, a group created in 1987 to preserve the “Western intellectual heritage,” 37 of these academic centers exist; 20 were created in the past three years.

Many of them have received donations from a handful of relatively new organizations, including Veritas, which was created in 2006, and the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. Miller, a Chicago entrepreneur, established the center as an independent nonprofit last fall after he worked with the 55-year-old Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which promotes conservative thought on campus.

Now, thanks in part to years of intensive lobbying by the National Association for Scholars, these projects may soon receive federal money as well. The new Higher Education Act, signed into law last month, provides grants for “academic programs or centers” devoted to “traditional American history, free institutions or Western civilization.”

The provision was “fashioned with this movement in mind,” Stephen Balch, a Republican and the founder and president of the association, said after the bill passed Congress, and “will help it gain even greater momentum.”

It is up to Congress to decide whether to finance the effort, and how much to put toward it.