BY SAMANTHA PARSONS

This is a guest post by Samantha Parsons, a graduate of George Mason University and co-founder of Transparent GMU. She is now a Grassroots Campaign Strategist at UnKoch My Campus.

On February 9th, George Mason University students filed a lawsuit against their school and its fundraising arm, the George Mason University Foundation, in hopes of obtaining grant and gift agreements between private donors and the Foundation.

Transparent GMU, the student organization that filed the suit, is worried about the potential for private donors to influence their education, according to a press release. Of particular concern is their university’s largest donor, the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF). Students cite fears that CKF might have gained influence over their university’s faculty, curriculum, and research in exchange for large financial contributions.

Students filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking grant and gift agreements between the university and the Charles Koch Foundation in 2014 and 2016, but they were denied both times. The university said that the GMU Foundation, which they claim is not subject to FOIA, controls private donor agreements. The students’ legal petition argues that the Virginia Freedom of Information Act applies to the GMU Foundation since it is performing a function on behalf of a public body.

The Charles Koch Foundation has donated $142 million to nearly 400 universities since 2005, $95.5 million going to George Mason University alone. Charles Koch finances, and sits on the Board of Directors of, two think-tanks on campus: the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies.

Questions about George Mason’s relationship with Koch were first raised after a 2007 multi-million dollar gift agreement between the Charles Koch Foundation and Florida State University was made public. That gift agreement came with a Koch-appointed advisory board that gave Koch veto power over faculty hiring. The “gift” was also conditional on the selection of the respective department chair, and granted direct influence over curricular and extracurricular programming, graduate fellowships, post-doctoral programming, and the creation of a certificate program.

UnKoch My Campus has been successful in obtaining eight other agreements between the Charles Koch Foundation and universities, all of which contain clauses and conditions that violate academic freedom and shared governance.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has released suggestions for university policies that aim to protect universities from this type of outside influence. Their Recommended Principles to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships states

The university must preserve the primacy of shared academic governance in establishing campus-wide policies for planning, developing, implementing, monitoring, and assessing all donor agreements and collaborations, whether with private industry, government, or nonprofit groups. Faculty, not outside sponsors, should retain majority control over the campus management of such agreements and collaborations.”

The use of university foundations to raise private funding for universities is not new or out of the ordinary; however, it does seem to raise important questions about the ways in which outsourcing university functions, like fundraising, to private entities might threaten faculty governance. Without transparency of agreements between private donors and universities, the governance standards recommended by the AAUP will be impossible to achieve.

For updates on the ongoing lawsuit at George Mason University, follow Transparent GMU on Facebook or view their petition to the school here.