Nestled in the Rocky Mountains north of Salt Lake City, Utah State University (USU) is known for its agriculture, education and space research programs. In 2008, the Charles Koch foundation gave USU $25,000 every year for one “Koch professor” and the same stipend for each of four “faculty junior professors.” The agreement mentioned “academic freedom” but also required USU to involve the Koch foundation in reviewing candidates for the professorships. Randy Simmons, a researcher with strong and lengthy ties to Koch-related organizations, was named as the Koch professor.
In 2017, the Koch Foundation increased its presence substantially with a donation of $25 million. The university used the money to hire 13 of 19 staff members from Strata Policy, a prominent libertarian think tank that was previously independent of the university, and place them at the university’s new Koch-funded Center for Growth and Opportunity (CGO) in the Huntsman School of Business. Randy Simmons became the Center’s outreach director.
The move raised eyebrows among the university’s faculty and in February the Faculty Senate voted to establish a task force to monitor the donation.
“From what I have seen, the CGO is falling right in line with what you would expect from a Koch-funded center,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of environmental economics at USU.
A School of Business professor, who requested anonymity due to fear of retribution from university administrators, said the center’s purpose is to “persuade these policy makers about public lands, anti-green energy and such”, the professor said. “It’s not academically sound research, what we look for in a business school.”
Those quotes come from an investigative report by two USU student journalists published jointly today by the Utah Statesman, the campus newspaper, and The Guardian. For a year the students, Allison Berg and Carter Moore, investigated USU’s relationship to the Koch Foundation. They “interviewed more than 20 of our fellow students and staff, and pulled dozens of public records. What we found paints a picture of how Charles Koch is using his wealth to affect the education of 3,500 students at the business school.”
The students found that although CGO is physically located on the university campus, according to tax filings and employee pay stubs it shares a legal address with Strata Policy, located two miles from campus. Nonetheless, USU contends that the Center for Growth and Opportunity and Strata Policy have no connections to each other, and Strata has never been associated with the university. “We are completely independent of our funders in how we select the research we do,” said Parker Jeppesen, communications director at the CGO. “Our donors are completely walled off from the research process.”
Perhaps, but it does seem more than a bit odd that all the research conducted at the Center reflects the ideological approach associated with Strata Policy, which “has backed conservative positions on issues such as fossil fuel dependence, public land management and signed a letter in support of Donald Trump’s controversial downsizing of national monuments.”
The students’ concerns extend beyond research to the classroom. The donation also funds the Koch Scholar program, through which fifteen students are given a $1,000 stipend and selected to participate in a “reading group”, tasked with reading one book a week. According to the Koch Scholar’s website, the group’s purpose is to “meet weekly to discuss classic and contemporary literary works for a few hours over dinner.” But that’s not how some students saw it:
“Definitely a majority libertarian experience,” said Savanna Jones, 21, who attended the business school as an economics major and will attend Georgetown University Law School this fall. “The professors all were pretty much of one mind and the majority of the students attracted to the program were as well.”
Jones says the required reading given to scholars simply used different analogies to “tell the same story” of the failures of government, a pillar of libertarian thinking.
“I just felt like we were going in circles,” she said.
Angel Lopez says he usually remains quiet during discussions and regrets the few instances he spoke up to offer an alternative view of more liberal ideals. “The professors have very strong viewpoints and kind of shut yours down. I had that happen to me maybe once or twice,” Lopez said.
Lopez, a son of Latino immigrants who aspired to become a social worker, “felt the program was promoting a hardline brand of rightwing politics. His required readings, with titles such as Order Without Law and Anarchy Unbound, could often be boiled down to a single idea: Government is bad.”
Predictably, the program’s faculty adviser disagreed, contending, “We’ve never done anything to prevent students from expressing their points of view.” But the charge is not a new one. Similar Koch-funded programs have involved required readings by the likes of Ayn Rand, whose books have been distributed without charge, the Koch donation absorbing the cost. At Arizona State University, where Koch donations have been supplemented by $7 million in legislative appropriations, the program pays for spring break trips to India for twelve students, who must take at least one of the program’s classes as a condition of winning a spot on the trip, an attempt to boost interest in what remains a low-enrolled program.
Conservatives like the Kochs often complain of liberal “indoctrination” on campus. But, it seems, when given the chance they are the ones whose teaching and research is one-sided and constricted.
To be sure, donors have every right to request that their donations be used for goals they support. But it is the university’s responsibility to ensure that those goals do not conflict with basic principles of institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and shared governance. As I wrote in an extensive treatment of the dangers posed to academic freedom by unconstrained external donations in chapter 5 of The Future of Academic Freedom,
An analogy can also be drawn between the kind of funding provided by Koch interests and the China-sponsored Confucius Institutes, about whose practices the AAUP warned in a 2014 statement and that, ironically, have more recently been targeted by political conservatives who might otherwise turn a blind eye to similar practices by externally funded conservative centers. The association’s objection to the Confucius Institutes was related not to the content they promoted but to their apparent lack of critical independence. “Allowing any third-party control of academic matters is inconsistent with principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and the institutional autonomy of colleges and universities,” the association’s Committee A declared.
I don’t know what the USU Senate task force will uncover, but I hope the student journalists keep digging.
