Rigging academia

by | May 7, 2018 | Editor's Blog, Education | 10 comments

For years conservatives have complained that liberals are controlling our colleges and universities, especially public ones, and squashing academic freedom. Now, it turns out that private donors are using their money to exert influence over the administration of schools. At Virginia’s largest public university, George Mason University, the Koch brothers put strings on donations that gave them influence over hiring and firing faculty.

They aren’t squashing academic freedom. They’re just putting a price on it. You know, applying free market principles to funding higher education.

The episode exposes the devolution of the conservative movement into a group of whiners and victims–and scam artists. They’re trying to rig the academic system like they’ve tried to rig elections, but it’s not flying with people who are well-educated. For all of their pissing and moaning about free speech on campus, conservatives like the Kochs made a deal with the devil when they allied themselves with reactionary populists who see science as a threat to evangelicalism and who have resented institutions of higher learning for decades.

For the past thirty years, conservative thinkers have marched with climate change deniers and revisionist historians who place Confederate leaders along side the Founding Fathers as heroes of our country. They’ve embraced the religion of supply side economics and free market extremism even as wages have stayed flat and income inequality has exploded. They’re philosophy of economics benefits too few and leaves too many behind. And they wonder why academics have largely rejected the conservativism that led to Trump.

The Kochs have long tried to influence academia. Here in North Carolina, they’ve funded the Center for Free Enterprise at Western Carolina University. That’s a fine endeavor as long as they don’t force the faculty to adopt and defend their political philosophy that’s entwined with their economic one.

The John William Pope Foundation recently announced a very generous $10 million grant to UNC. We should all be express our thanks to the Pope family for the gift—as long as it doesn’t come with strings attached. Unfortunately, the Kochs’ manipulation makes large grants from donors who hold strong political views suspect. Also unfortunately, we have a Board of Governors at UNC with members who are meddling in the day-to-day operation of the University and who have obvious political intentions. In other words, we don’t have the oversight we need at one of the nation’s premier public university systems to protect academic integrity from partisan political meddling.

It’s not that conservative ideas and philosophy don’t have a place in academia. They do, but when they’re combined with a political agenda, they’re infringing on the academic freedom conservatives claim to cherish. They should focus as much on the ideals of limited government, personal liberty and the virtues of western civilization and less on the tactics they’ve tried to use to achieve them. And they should stay away from trying to buy our public colleges and universities.

10 Comments

  1. Lee Nackman

    If you want to understand the extent of the Koch’s agenda and their long game, read Prof. Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains. It makes so much of what’s going on clear. It also will give you insight into the historical involvement of George Mason University in the whole movement.

  2. Vicki Boyer

    The Koch tentacles go further than you think. They actually reach Into NC high schools.
    NCGA GOP legislated a high school graduation requirement, a course called Founding Principles, that came straight out of ALEC’s set of legislative bills. The class requirements look somewhat inocuous but subtly push the economic agenda of the Kochs.
    They want to get into elementary education.

  3. Marcia Sayre

    George Mason was not the first. Florida State University sold out the Economics department to the Kochs several years ago and gave them the right to appoint faculty members in that department. Their tentacles are all over!

  4. Bettywhite

    I’ve said this numerous times, but it bears repeating: I simply do not understand the Kochs. If I was in my 80s and worth billions, I’d be out enjoying my life instead of trying to amass more and more money. You can’t take it with you, boys!

    • Jay Ligon

      It’s worse than that. Their economic theories are not just detrimental to us. They would not help the Kochs. They complained bitterly about the Obama Administration, but they each doubled their net worth from $19 billion in 2008 to more than $41 billion in 2016, according to Forbes.

      How much better must life become for the Kochs’ to be happy? I don’t think there is enough money on earth to satisfy their greed. Together they added more than $42 billion to their pile of wealth in 8 years, an average of $5.2 billion per year under a President they hated. The Kochs’ policies are really about creating misery for everyone else.

  5. Dwight Willis

    My son graduated from George Mason Law School in 2001. That law school was renamed the Antonin Scalia Law School last year after a sizable contribution from Judge Scalia’s estate. Our family no longer participates in that alumni association or makes contributions to their annual fund drive.

  6. Hayes McNeill

    Even rich private colleges and universities aren’t safe from the taint. It appears that, over the objections of the faculty, the Kochs have bought into Wake Forest.

  7. Brian Finch

    Another cautionary tale. Unfortunately for North Carolina’s once proud public instruction system, the undermining continues with the “scholarship” private school voucher system, charter school growth, and limiting measures towards a sufficient public school funding formula. These, along with other politically biased approaches, continue to erode our public school infastructure. A shameful war the GOP General Assembly has waged. Vote this November!

  8. Norma Munn

    Amen. Just curious, how does the upcoming generation of the Koch family sees this?

    One should also not forget that they burnished their image by funding large cultural institutions rather generously, and usually kept hands off. Or at least they were not obvious in NYC. Rudy tried, repeatedly, but never succeeded.

  9. Jay Ligon

    The conservatives are playing the long game. After David Koch ran for vice president as the Libertarian candidate in 1980, and he lost big, the made a decision to change our culture. The Libertarians ran on the repeal of Medicare, Social Security, and environmental laws. They also opposed laws against drug trafficking and prostitution.

    The Koch brothers want to repeal most of the social and economic legislation passed in the 20th Century, but it is too popular. Laws such as minimum wage, civil rights, and economic regulations against monopoly control are too kind to the unwashed non-billionaires in our country, in their view.

    After the voters handed them their heads, the Kochs did not shrink from political activism, they decided to take on an even more, perhaps unattainable long-term goal. They would invest billions of dollars in changing our American culture and the minds of millions of us.

    That effort is now known as the Kochtipus because it spreads throughout the country in political creatures large and small. They fund hundreds of “think tanks” which produce academic-sounding material which reflects their extreme views. They bought media organizations and produce mass messaging across the country.

    In Raleigh, they invested heavily in the local school board elections and the city counsel races. There is no stone unturned by the Koch organization.

    Academia was a goal of theirs, but, for decades, institutions resisted their overtures because the price of accepting the largess offered by the Kochs was too high. The Kochs offered money with strings attached. They would fund a chair in Economics only if the Kochs could dictate the curriculum. The professor would have to teach the Kochs’ ideas on economics.

    George Mason University has become the Koch’s beachhead where all their ideas are being taught. George Mason made the deal that the Koch’s offered elsewhere. They ceded control to the Kochs.

    The Kochs and the Pope and other oligarchs in the United States have been benefitting from a tax scam which has been a part of the tax code since the 1950s. They are able to take tax deductions for charitable contributions based on their contributions to “education.” What the Kochs and the Popes are doing is not so much “educating” people as targeting citizens for indoctrination.

    Their think tanks, their academic chairs, and their right-wing propaganda channels amount to a stealth attack on democratic institutions.

    They are patient, willing to take decades to change minds, and they are winning a lot of battles in the culture war. Billions of tax-deductible dollars make a difference.

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