UnKoching George Mason University: The Power of Organizing

BY BETHANY LETIECQ

When I joined the George Mason University faculty in 2013, I had already had a taste of what could be achieved when faculty, students, community members, and organizations work together in common cause. Earlier in my career, I helped organize a faculty union at Montana State University and, in my community-based work in partnership with Mexican migrants, I cofounded the Montana Immigrant Justice Alliance, which successfully sued the state to block anti-immigrant reforms.

So when I arrived at Mason, I knew I wanted to continue to engage in scholar-activism, organizing, and building power—I just didn’t know where that would lead. Then in 2016 the Charles Koch Foundation and an anonymous donor gave $30 million to the GMU law school, seeking to change the name to the Antonin Scalia School of Law. Perhaps because of the public scrutiny surrounding this deal, the administration released the gift agreement and insisted that the gift came with no strings attached.

However, many faculty, students and concerned citizens had a different take. We saw the gift agreement as not only providing donors with too much influence, but also violating AAUP principles of academic freedom and academic control.

While the faculty senate of GMU worked on resolutions in opposition to the law school renaming and to the terms of the gift agreement, other faculty, concerned citizens, and I began organizing and petitioning in concert with a group of students known as Transparent GMU. This student organization had been working to expose the undue influence of private donors at Mason since 2012. And when the law school renaming gift became a fait accompli, this group stood in protest during a naming ceremony holding signs reading “Protect Public Ed, Not Private Interests.”

This background is important as we fast forward to the present, because the initial organizing and educating efforts begun in spring 2016 were critical to our recent campaign to expose undue private influence at Mason.

After the GMU law school scandal, I worked together with my AAUP colleagues to revitalize our AAUP chapter, which had grown somewhat dormant over the years. We formed a new executive team and began hosting meetings and organizing events on campus. I also started to educate myself in earnest about AAUP principles, gift acceptance policies at other institutions, and the like. I began reading books on the privatization and corporatization of public universities. Samantha Parsons, a cofounder of Transparent GMU as well as UnKoch My Campus, also began educating me about donor influence, and in particular, the specific ways in which the Kochs seek to manipulate universities and their faculty.

In 2016, I was elected to the GMU faculty senate. I nominated myself to serve on the newly formed Ad Hoc Institutional Conflict of Interest (ICOI) Committee, which was formed to study gift acceptance policies and other ICOI matters. As AAUP@Mason chapter president and faculty senator, I partnered with our faculty senate chair, Keith Renshaw, and together we agreed to visit with as many departments, colleges, and schools on campus as we could to talk to faculty about the senate and the AAUP. We wanted to remind faculty that there were structures on campus that we could use to organize us as a body and build our collective power. While many listened with a skepticism born out of years of top-down administrative overreach into faculty affairs, others joined our AAUP chapter and pledged to get involved.

In 2017, with support from the Virginia AAUP conference, I attended the AAUP Summer Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. And, as luck would have it, I got to share a dorm suite with Samantha Parsons of UnKoch My Campus. At the Institute, I met comrades from across the country who were likewise working hard to strengthen shared faculty governance and protect their institutions from undue donor influence. Perhaps most important, Sam and I got to know each other, and we bonded over shared values and a commitment to gift acceptance policy revision.

Early in fall 2017, as the ICOI Committee worked to understand the relationship between the GMU Foundation and the university and how gift acceptance policies worked, we learned that the student organization, Transparent GMU, had launched a lawsuit against the Foundation and GMU. After years of trying to access gift agreements from both entities and being stymied at every turn, the students determined they had to sue.

That October, I invited the cofounders of UnKoch My Campus to come to Mason to deliver a lecture on understanding donor influence. At this event, Transparent GMU student leaders also discussed their lawsuit premised on the notion that the GMU Foundation should be subject to public FOIA laws and should make all gift agreements public.

This was an inspiring time—networking and building opportunities to engage colleagues, students, and the broader community on issues of undue donor influence. In early April 2018, I had an opportunity to bring the UnKoch and Transparent GMU team back together as guest speakers. This time, they presented on a panel to members of the faculty senate of Virginia and the state AAUP conference, who had assembled at Mason for their joint spring meeting.  We also heard from AAUP member and GMU faculty senator Dave Kuebrich, who drew connections between Koch efforts to influence universities and climate-change denial. And the AAUP’s political organizer, Monica Owens, joined us to discuss the corporatization of public universities.

Looking back, each of these events was critical.

On April 24, 2018, the Transparent GMU lawsuit was litigated in court (with the judge’s ruling due in mid-May).

On April 25, the ICOI Committee placed motions on making gift agreements public and ensuring faculty involvement in gift acceptance procedures on the agenda for the May 2 faculty senate meeting.

Then, on April 27, President Cabrera sent an email to both faculty and students at around 8:00 p.m. In this email, he stated the existence of gift agreements in the possession of the university (and not the GMU Foundation) that did not meet his expectations of academic independence. It was a bombshell!

About an hour later, Samantha Parsons was among the first to receive the actual gift agreements that, we now understand, were responsive to her FOIA request made to the university in March 2018. Soon Sam and I were immersed in these gift agreement documents. We finally had the evidence we knew existed. We were at times celebratory because we felt vindicated after so many years of being made to feel like conspiracy theorists by the administration. But we also had to come to grips with the feelings of betrayal and confusion.

Cue the press. Cue the whirlwind of events that transpired over the past week culminating in a meeting with the president, two faculty senate meetings, and the passage of several motions calling on the university to make public all gift agreements, involve faculty in the governance of gift acceptance, halt new gifts that only partially cover the costs of donor-established tenure lines until we can understand the true costs of these arrangements, and begin the hard work of restoring trust—the public trust—and rebuilding our reputation as an institution of higher education that cannot be sold to the highest bidder.

This story is still unfolding. Stay tuned!

A few stories in the press: 

GMU Fourth Estate (4 part series on Koch at GMU)

http://gmufourthestate.com/2018/03/05/koch-uncovered-part-one/#sthash.AawcxKe3.dpbs

http://www.fairfaxtimes.com/articles/gmu-student-lawsuit-challenges-privacy-influence-of-public-university-donors/article_8da92c8a-4a60-11e8-8c17-635deab723b2.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/george-mason-gets-koch-money-now-this-group-wants-to-know-more/2018/04/24/dfc7ccda-4766-11e8-827e-190efaf1f1ee_story.html?utm_term=.001d5ca26642

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mason.html

Guest blogger Bethany Letiecq is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science at George Mason University and President of the Mason Chapter of the AAUP (Advocacy Chapter).

 

27 thoughts on “UnKoching George Mason University: The Power of Organizing

  1. Odd, you didn’t post the retraction story when the WaPo learned that the Kochs did not in fact have illicit influence. Oops.

    • This was an editorial, not a news article. Apparently this editorial suggested that Koch demanded influence over promotion and tenure decisions, when in fact it is hiring issues that were the concern. That hiring influence was very real, and there has been no retraction about that, because it is the truth, and that’s what everyone is talking about.

  2. It’s also odd that no one interested interested in transparency at GMU seems to care about the Center for Climate Change Communication, RepublicEN, or the other left of center research entities that brought in faculty and staff under similar arrangements.

    • There should be full transparency in gift agreements. If there are other gift agreements that gave donors influence in hiring, then we should know about them. So far, the Koch agreement is the only one where there is proof of this. Do you have more information proving what you claim?

      • Last I checked, I didn’t see Unkoch My Campus or the AAUP suing GMU for the release of other agreements for political centers that they support. So until you show that you are not selectively targeting the Koch Brothers by providing similar scrutiny to those other agreements, you have no basis to dismiss Mr. Surprenant’s concerns.

  3. How can you base any claim on academic freedom when you are working against the freedom of faculty to receive grants from like-minded organizations to support their research? They don’t need to be “protected” against getting support for their desired projects. You are in fact attacking their academic freedom, and you seem to be doing so because you disagree with them ideologically.

  4. Apparently, the “law school scandal” consists of accepting a $30 million gift for scholarships. The agreements, as the author noted, are public, and there is nothing in them that is scandalous or suggests any impact on academic freedom.

    The real scandal here seems to be that GMU hired a “scholar-activist” whose self-proclaimed goal is to “engage in scholar-activism, organizing, and building power.” That’s an odd job description for someone who purports to be an academic rather than a political activist, and exactly the sort of individual who is bringing the modern academy into disrepute.

      • I don’t advocate firing anyone, and more pertinently not hiring anyone, for their political views, though the latter is a real problem for non-Progressives. I merely pointed out that the author seems to self-define her own role as a professor as an activist, not a scholar. If you want to be a professional political activist, there are plenty of jobs out there in politics. But academic jobs should be reserved for those who see their primary mission as scholarship and teaching, with political activism on their own time and dime.

        • It certainly sounds like you’re advocating hiring discrimination against activists. And you’re not alone. It’s very common in academia. This is simply a false assumption, that activism somehow prevents someone from being a good scholar or teacher. When you announce that someone has a choice, to be a professor or an activist, but you can’t be both, you are attacking academic freedom.

          • Let’s try again, a bit more slowly. Anyone is free to engage in political activism on their own time. It’s not, or at least shouldn’t be, part of the job description of a professor. If it is, then there should be no public funding for higher education, because it would be wrong to force taxpayers to pay for political activism most of them don’t agree with.

          • If one has undertaken one’s scholarly and teaching responsibilities, and instead of bowling or needlepoint or online gaming your hobby is political activism, no problem. But it certainly wouldn’t be a plus for tenure, promotion, or anything else that someone is “engaged in scholar-activism, organizing, and building power.”

      • “As I recently argued at the Martin Center blog, academia must not punish scholar-activists for their political views”

        And yet, John K. Wilson, here you are arguing that scholars on the right should be “unkoched” because you deem their work to be political in nature.

        If you admit the premise that “activism” is a legitimate scholarly activity, it’s hard to also argue that anything the Kochs are funding in activism is illegitimate because of its presumed political agenda. Either all activism – including activism for causes you don’t like – is legitimate. Or if not, the same charges you make against Koch faculty also apply to all your activist causes on the left – including the funding that they take from left wing foundations.

        • Yes, the Koch Foundation is clearly activist, and yes, activism is legitimate. What’s illegitimate is enforcing your activism on others and violating academic standards by having donors involved in the selection of faculty.

          • In other words, the Mocha can donate all the money they want, but they shouldn’t have any day on how it’s spent. That way, you can spend it supporting things the Kochs oppose.

            If would never donate a dime to anyplace of it wasn’t being spent as I wanted it spent. No responsible person would.

          • John — What activism was “enforced” on others by the Kochs? Or what of anything else was “enforced”? It’s not as if they made students become economics majors, or that the economics faculty they funded did not want their funding for their research. There are no law professors clamoring that their academic freedom was “violated” by any of these donations – even though you keep saying that it was.

            On selecting faculty – as others above have noted (and as the WaPo conceded in its correction), you are overstating the facts of your case. They had a minority role in approving joint appointments at the Mercatus center that didn’t affect any of the normal tenure review procedures in the economics department. Whether this is inappropriate or not is a debatable point, but as we’re also starting to see it appears that other universities do this sort of thing as well.

            Would you at least admit that large donors are legitimate stakeholders in how their money is spent? And that universities have a long and sordid history of misusing philanthropic donations? Remember the guy who left his $4 million estate to the University of New Hampshire…only for the school to spend it on a new football scoreboard? If so, it necessarily follows that the level of appropriate donor involvement and oversight for large grants is not zero, as you seem to think should be the case for the Kochs. We can debate where the line should be drawn of course. But your side seems to be arguing as if that line is both clear and retroactive without first establishing it.

  5. It looks like Samantha Parsons may be engaging in a conflict of interest. On the one hand, she’s a cofounder of UnKochMyCampus, which seeks to bar Koch Industries from donating to GMU. That would be an interference with faculty freedom to do reseach. On the other hand, she’s a cofounder of TransparentGMU, which seeks to protect faculty freedom. The goals of these organizations are in conflict, and a member of one shouldn’t be a member of the other. Given that she’s thus engaging in a conflict of interest, shouldn’t this be of interest to the Ad Hoc Institutional Conflict of Interest (ICOI) Committee?

  6. dah da da dahhhhh! Here come the Koch trolls!

    Odd how the only people stepping up to defend Mr. Koch are those taking his money, huh?

    We have some of the usual suspects…Chris, Jason, good to see you again today. (How was yesterday?)

    For all your appeals to whatever principle can justify a career advancing the interests of an oil billionaire, you didn’t feel like there’s any good reason to mention you / your programs / your departments are paid by Koch, in this backlash to scrutiny over your benefactor?

    Hi I’m Connor with Greenpeace and UnKoch My Campus – see? disclosure is easy.

    (sorrynotsorry you’ve had a crummy week! More to come, of course!)

    Thanks to Bethany for writing this account. It’s nice working with people who don’t have anything to hide.

    • Hi, Connor. Since disclosure is so easy, when is UnKoch My Campus going to release its financials, including who gives it money, how much, and under what terms? We know A LOT more about Koch’s relationship with GMU than we know about UMC’s relationship with Greenpeace, much less any other donors.

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