BY HANK REICHMAN

In February, 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. Of particular concern is GMU’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.  At a hearing in October Judge John M. Tran said the case could become “historic.”

On Tuesday, April 24, the case will go to trial in the Fairfax County Circuit Court.  Supporters of the students are calling on anyone in or near Northern Virginia to pack the courtroom.  Here is the schedule:

Students will march from campus to the courthouse, where they will gather with community members holding banners and signs. Their march over will be led by a personal fire engine operated by a community supporter!

• 8:15 AM – Students meet outside of Merten Hall on GMU Fairfax Campus;
• 8:45 AM – Students begin march to courthouse;
• 9:00 AM – Students converge with community supporters for a brief rally on the sidewalk across the street from Hard Times Cafe, alongside Chain Bridge Road;
• 10:00 AM – Trial will begin inside of the Fairfax County Circuit Court

George Mason University has received almost $120 million from the Charles Koch foundation between 2005 and 2017. Much of this funding has gone to the university’s Mercatus Center, which describes itself as the “world’s premier university source for market-related ideas,” and its Institute for Humane Studies, which researches “the practice and potentials of freedom.”  Charles Koch chairs the Institute’s board and serves on the board of the Mercatus Center.  Koch Industries Executive Vice President Richard Fink, described by a Koch biographer as “Koch’s brain,” also sits on the two boards.

Based on agreements between the Foundation and other universities, as well as research into the network’s strategy and connections to GMU, there is strong reason to believe there are significant strings attached to that money.  To find out, Transparent GMU filed a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request for GMU’s agreements with the Charles Koch Foundation, but the University said that their fundraising foundation, the GMU Foundation, was in possession of those records. The students then filed a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request for the GMU Foundation’s records.  The GMU Foundation denied their request because they are a private foundation that is not subject to FOIA.

As I wrote on this blog in March 2017,

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. . . .

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.

In May 2016, the George Mason Faculty Senate passed two resolutions raising significant questions about donations from the Koch Foundation and from an anonymous donor that involved, among other things, the renaming of the GMU law school for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.  These came on top of an initial resolution of “concern” approved by a 21-13 vote a week earlier.

In response, AAUP Associate Secretary Anita Levy sent a letter to the GMU president and the chair of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia expressing concern over these donations.  The AAUP shared the university faculty senate’s deep concerns about the terms of the donor agreements under which the university carries many other obligations, including creating two new centers affiliated with the law school and appointing new faculty. Under AAUP principles, Levy wrote, the faculty should be meaningfully involved in decisions such as whether to accept the grant and its attached conditions. Decisions about a college’s long-range objectives, faculty appointments, and changes in the structure of academic programs relate to the faculty’s areas of professional competence and thus also require their direct involvement.

The AAUP’s 2004 Statement on Corporate Funding of Academic Research, while mainly concerned with individual research contracts with private industry, enunciates a number of principles that apply as well to the kinds of activities funded by the Koch network and, indeed, by all outside funders:

1. Consistent with principles of sound academic governance, the faculty should have a major role not only in formulating the institution’s policy with respect to research undertaken in collaboration with industry, but also in developing the institution’s plan for assessing the effectiveness of the policy. The policy and the plan should be distributed regularly to all faculty, who should inform students and staff members associated with them of their contents.
2. The faculty should work to ensure that the university’s plan for monitoring the institution’s conflict-of-interest policy is consistent with the principles of academic freedom. There should be emphasis on ensuring that the source and purpose of all corporate-funded research contracts can be publicly disclosed.  Such contracts should explicitly provide for the open communication of research results, not subject to the sponsor’s permission for publication.
3. The faculty should call for, and participate in, the periodic review of the impact of industrially sponsored research on the education of students, and on the recruitment and evaluation of researchers (whether or not they hold regular faculty appointments) and postdoctoral fellows.
4. The faculty should insist that regular procedures be in place to deal with alleged violations by an individual of the university’s conflict-of-interest policy. Should disciplinary action be contemplated, it is essential that safeguards of academic due process be respected.
5. Because research relationships with industry are not static, the faculty, in order to ensure that the assessment of conflict-of-interest policies is responsive to changing needs, should regularly review the policies themselves as well as the instruments for conducting the assessment.

The AAUP’s 2014 Recommended Principles to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships expanded upon these principles and is also relevant to non-industrial external funding.  It declared:

Academic freedom does not entitle faculty members to accept outside responsibilities that jeopardize or gravely compromise their primary university responsibilities.  Academic freedom does not entitle faculty members to sign away their freedom to disseminate research results.  Academic freedom does not entitle faculty members to ignore financial conflicts of interest that could dangerously compromise the informed consent process and the impartiality of research.  It follows, therefore, that academic freedom does not guarantee faculty members the freedom to take money regardless of the conditions attached.