BY HANK REICHMAN

In the fall of 2016 the AAUP, the College Media Association, the Student Press Law Center, and the National Coalition Against Censorship issued a report, Threats to the Independence of Student Media.  The report declared, “Candid journalism that discusses students’ dissatisfaction with the perceived shortcomings of their institutions can be uncomfortable for campus authorities.  Nevertheless, this journalism fulfills a healthful civic function.”  The report quoted the 1967 Joint Statement on the Rights and Freedoms of Students:

Student publications and the student press are valuable aids in establishing and maintaining an atmosphere of free and responsible discussion and of intellectual exploration on the campus.  They are a means of bringing student concerns to the attention of the faculty and the institutional authorities and of formulating student opinion on various issues on the campus and in the world at large.

Perhaps no better illustration of the importance of these principles can be found than in a four-part series being published this week by the independent student newspaper at Tufts University, The Tufts Daily.  “Dark Money at Tufts” meticulously documents how Tufts “has accepted over $22 million since 1985 from charitable foundations that have openly expressed a desire to promote their political agenda at institutes of higher education, or which have directly funded academically controversial, racially antagonistic research at Tufts.”  The report “spotlights seven controversial foundations that have supported Tufts in the last 33 years and reveals the process by which the university accepts such donations.”

The seven foundations are “the John M. Olin Foundation, which gave $1,626,051; the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which gave $7,620,000; The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which gave $1,018,250; the John Templeton Foundation, which gave $6,699,828; the Earhart Foundation, which gave $1,413,008; the Smith Richardson Foundation, which gave $1,193,017; and the Charles Koch Foundation, which pledged to donate $3,000,000 over a six-year period beginning in 2017.”

The report acknowledges that while “not all of the foundations included . . . have supported controversial scholarship at Tufts, they have all engaged in questionable donation campaigns at universities across the country.”

Here is an example of what these intrepid student journalists discovered.  The Charles Koch Foundation is funding the Center for Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to the tune of $3 million.  In the past the Koch Foundation has inappropriately sought to influence faculty hiring and curricular decisions.  In response to an inquiry a Tufts administrator told the student journalists that “donors sometimes retain the right to give final faculty approval but did not directly respond when asked if donors can influence the hiring process.  ‘For some awards, the agreement will call for Tufts to select personnel and for the sponsor to give final approval based on the personnel’s qualifications,'” he said.

The student journalists were also concerned about the Koch Foundation’s past practice of using grants to propagandize students:

The Charles Koch Foundation contributed funding to the Center for Choice and Market Process at the College of Charleston. In 2010, the foundation requested that the center’s director, Peter Calcagno, share students’ personal email addresses so that it could recruit them for other foundation initiatives, according to an email released by the Center for Public Integrity.

“Please submit names and permanent e-mail addresses (preferably not ending in .edu), if your program includes any activities that include a roster of students,” Charlie Ruger, director of university investments at the Charles Koch Foundation, and Derek Johnson, vice president of education at the Charles Koch Institute, wrote to Calcagno. “Given our goals, this section of the report will factor substantially into our evaluation of future funding requests.”

In response the administration could not say whether “Tufts has any rules that bar the sharing of personal student data with charitable foundations,” although they were not aware of any cases where this has occurred.

Or here’s another example:

In a 2005 Philanthropy magazine article, former Executive Director of the John M. Olin Foundation James Piereson explained that the foundation, through its donations, hopes to present an alternative to an overwhelmingly liberal academic consensus in higher education. . . .

Piereson added that conservative philanthropy is necessary to counteract universities’ efforts to promote faculty diversity, which he said were created to warrant hiring from traditionally progressive demographics, including “radical blacks and homosexuals.” . . .

The John M. Olin Foundation gave $1,626,051 to Tufts from 1986 to 1998 to support several professorships and media seminars, according to financial records released by Greenpeace.

Michael Joyce, executive vice president of the John M. Olin Foundation from 1979 to 1985 and president of the Bradley Foundation from 1985 to 2001, articulated a similar vision of supporting an ideological battle within higher education in a 2003 speech at Georgetown University.

“At Olin and later at Bradley, our overarching purpose was to use philanthropy to support a war of ideas to defend and help recover the political imagination of the founders: the self-evident truth, that rights and worth are a legacy of the creator — not the result of some endless revaluing of values,” Joyce said.

Foundations at which Joyce held leadership positions donated over $2.5 million to Tufts between 1986 and 2015 during and after his tenures.

The story continues in part 2 of the series:

The John Templeton Foundation funded the now-closed Cultural Change Institute at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, founded in 2007 by former Fletcher adjunct professor and senior research fellow Lawrence Harrison, who has a history of racially divisive scholarship.

In his 1985 book, Underdevelopment is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case, Harrison argued that black slaves in Barbados benefited culturally from their enslavement due to the ‘noble’ acts of their British masters, leading to greater economic development, especially when compared to countries like Haiti.

“The [Barbadian] slaves were beneficiaries of significant acts of English noblesse oblige starting early in the eighteenth century,” Harrison wrote. . . .

The Templeton Foundation also funded Harrison’s 2013 book, Jews, Confucians, and Protestants: Cultural Capital and the End of Multiculturalism, in which he wrote that “black subculture, not racism and discrimination, was the principal cause of black underachievement.”

In a 2008 Christian Science Monitor opinion piece, Harrison identified the “Anglo-Protestant cultural tradition” as a way to create “homogeneity” to promote social progress. . . .

In addition to funding racially divisive research at Fletcher, the Templeton Foundation has also supported controversial research led by Herbert Benson, director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital.  Benson’s research investigated whether prayers can heal the sick even if patients are unaware that they are being prayed for, according to a simplified copy of the study’s trial report published in the American Heart Journal in 2006.  The trial ultimately concluded that prayers had no direct effect on patient recovery. . . .

The study cost $2.4 million and was largely funded by the Templeton Foundation, according to a 2006 article published in the Scientific American magazine. . . .

The Templeton Foundation has also supported college classes and conferences in which intelligent design was debated as scientific theory, according to a 2011 Nature article written by former Nature editor Mitchell Waldrop.

According to the series, the Templeton Foundation has donated a total of $6,699,828 to Tufts.   But they were not the only external funders of Harrison’s work.  According to the report, an officer at the Smith Richardson Foundation, which has donated $1,193,017, “suggested that Lawrence Harrison establish the Cultural Change Institute at The Fletcher School, according to Harrison’s 2013 book, Jews, Confucians, and Protestants: Cultural Capital and the End of Multiculturalism. The Smith Richardson Foundation also contributed funding to Harrison’s book.”

Part 3 of the series examines Tufts’ donation policies, concluding that they offer inadequate protection against politicized scholarship.  Some “donations were accepted,” the report says, “without full knowledge of the donors’ histories of funding controversial scholarship elsewhere in the United States despite a donation review process that involves several university offices, according to interviews with Tufts administrators and faculty.”  The report concludes:

Conversations with Tufts administrators and faculty responsible for managing donations from the seven organizations examined in this investigation reveal that they are often unaware of, or uninterested in, donors’ philanthropic record and relevant interests. Tufts’ disregard could allow these foundations and others to engage in the same self-promotion and recruiting tactics that they have used at other universities.

The fourth and final installment in the series will appear on Thursday, but it is already clear that these student journalists are asking important questions — many of which, to be honest, should have been asked earlier by faculty members.  To be sure, the problem here is not necessarily the content of these donors’ politics — they are, of course, entitled to fund programs they agree with and support.  Conservative views should be as freely expressed on campus as any other views.  And it would be foolish to assume that only money from the right can be corrupting. The issue is, rather, whether or not these donations conform to accepted principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and transparency.  “Shouldn’t we be concerned about anyone who is funding any academic research centers on political and social subjects, no matter their ideological direction?” journalist David Johnson has asked.

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 Tufts donors 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 on these principles and is also relevant to this sort of 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.”

As Christopher Newfield put it in a tweet, this is “an amazing investigation by a student newspaper.”  I agree with him that we should see more of this sort of journalism from the established higher education press.