Koch Whore

So, apparently it is just coming to light that our friend Charles Koch (or, rather, his foundation) gave $1.5 million a couple of years ago to Florida State University. He and his equally rich and therefore Libertarian (though not, of course, really small-l libertarian) brother are particular bogeymen of the left, as pure an incarnation of evil to Rachel Maddow as George Soros is to Glenn Beck.

There is no question, however, that the Koch brothers are quite the philanthropists, and not merely to right-wing, Tea-Partyish, causes. But whereas David supports everything from hospitals (especially cancer centers) to natural history museums to Lincoln Center, Charles’s largesse tends to be more ideologically inspired: the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, for example, “assists undergraduate and graduate students worldwide who have an interest in individual liberty”; it doesn’t require a genius to understand what that means when the poetry is removed. Charles, in other words, likes to attach strings.

According to Ray Bellamy and Kent S. Miller, respectively a faculty member in the College of Medicine and professor emeritus of psychology at Florida State, in an opinion piece on Tallahassee.com (and apparently on the pages of the Tallahassee Democrat), that’s precisely what happened in 2008:

In 2008, the [Charles G. Koch Charitable] foundation signed a memorandum of agreement with FSU in which they committed to a proposed budget of $6.5 million over a period of six years, with most of the effort to be located in the economics department. The provisions called for the hiring of five professors and other staff; establishing a program for the Study of Political Economy and Free Enterprise (SPEFE) and a program for Excellence in Economic Education (EEE); and the development of educational programs for undergraduate students.

A careful reading of the memorandum reveals a number of strings attached to the "gift."

• In order to preserve and safeguard the philanthropic and educational intent of the CGK Foundation … an advisory board will be created consisting of three members … chosen by CGK Foundation.

• The three senior professors must come in with tenure, and FSU must continue to fund them for at least four years past the project period.

• The Advisory Board of SPSFC and EEE is allowed to review all publicly provided material submitted by applicants for the Professorship positions.

• The Advisory Board will determine which candidates qualify to receive funding.

• No funding for a professorship position or any other affiliated program or position will be released without the review and approval of the Advisory Board.

• An undergraduate program will be devised and funded for $30,000 per year for three years. The committee responsible for the program will report to the Advisory Board.

Other strings spell out the right of the CGK Foundation to annually review the work of funded professors, publications, publicity, etc., and to pick up their marbles and go home if not satisfied.

Not surprisingly, the two academics “see all of this as seriously damaging to academic freedom.”

A subsequent article by Kris Hundley of the St. Petersburg Times reports that “During the first round of hiring in 2009, Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty's suggestions but ultimately agreed on two candidates.”

It is not uncommon for donors to specify conditions. Hell, when I send a check to my grad school alma mater, I specify that half go the College of Fine Arts and half to the Graduate School. I’m fully aware that the university will probably simply distribute more funds from other sources to the Business School and the Athletics Department, but it makes me feel as if I’m really contributing to something I believe in. I’m willing to go along with the charade, in other words.

Of course, when the checks have a few more zeroes than mine do, the demands can be greater: name a scholarship or a building or an entire program after me, make me a trustee, give me courtside tickets to see the basketball team play. All these are reasonable, at least up to a point, but when donors start dictating curriculum or personnel, it’s time to say “no.” And that’s not at all uncommon: I used to teach at a college that rejected what would have been a huge amount of money by local standards from a donor engaged in a perfectly legal business, but one of which the college disapproved (a brewery). More relevantly, Yale University returned $20 million (in early ‘90s dollars) to an alumnus who… wait for it… wanted to have veto power over professor hirings. Gary Fryer, Yale’s director of public information at the time, described such a condition as “unheard of,” saying “We would never accept a gift with that condition.”

There may be some disagreement about whether such ethical qualms still widely exist less than a generation later: Hundley quotes Jennifer Washburn, the author of University Inc., as describing the situation at Florida State as “truly shocking” and “an egregious example of a public university being willing to sell itself for next to nothing.” (Is it really the pricetag that bothers her?) But the same article also notes that similar arrangements to the one at Florida State have been made with Clemson and West Virginia Universities.

So… you’re probably waiting for me to launch into a protracted denunciation of Charles Koch. Ain’t gonna happen, at least this time. Do I think he’s a major cause of this country’s ills? Yes, I do. Evil? Could be. Responsible for this brouhaha? Not really. True, he bears some secondary responsibility. But the real blame attaches to David W. Rasmussen, the dean of the College of Social Sciences, who sees nothing wrong with selling out his program’s integrity: “it seems to me it would have been irresponsible not to do it.” No, sir, what is irresponsible is chasing after dollars, even a lot of them, at the expense of the university’s control over its own curriculum. This isn’t a question of whether we believe in the Kochs’ libertarianism; the situation would be unchanged if it were George Soros or Michael Moore or Barack Obama who was granted a measure of influence a legitimate university cannot surrender.

Nor is it relevant that the university apparently hired qualified people—if someone other than an officially constituted university search committee or the appropriate administrators had any say in the hiring process, it’s an enormous problem of professional ethics. It’s bad enough that there are those who regard a university degree as a commodity, with students as consumers and different programs competing to offer a product instead of regarding students as clients receiving a service provided by skilled professionals. But when the university itself can be bought, that’s a cataclysm.

Charles Koch may have been pushing the ethics envelope a little in asking for this kind of control. But, as I said in a different context, “the Koch brothers may exercise far too much influence…, [but] they do so because the rest of us let them.” Asking does no harm if the response is “no, thanks.” Mr. Koch is merely the john. It’s Mr. Rassmussen who’s the whore. In this particular case, a Koch whore.