BY HANK REICHMAN

In The Future of Academic Freedom I devote a chapter to the baleful influence on academic freedom of colleges’ and universities’ increasing reliance on external donors, many of whom act on political motivations potentially detrimental to institutional values.  Some of the possible pitfalls may be seen in how the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the country’s most prestigious scientific research institutions, has coped with the death of one donor, David Koch, and the scandal associated with another, sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in federal custody.

In an obituary for Koch published Friday MIT appreciatively recounted the conservative activist’s many donations to the institution in support of cancer research, child care and even basketball.  Like his brother Charles, David Koch was an MIT alumnus.  He was a life member of the MIT Corp., the institution’s board of directors.  His donations exceeded $100 million, making him, in the university’s words, “one of the most important benefactors in MIT’s modern history….  At any given moment around MIT, beneficiaries of Koch’s gifts included faculty with endowed professorships, students with fellowships he supported — and toddlers in the childcare center he helped found.”

However, even though MIT has played an important role in researching climate change and disseminating the truth about it, there was no mention at all of Koch’s anti-scientific and destructive role in that area.  That silence struck Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik as, well, more than a bit problematic.  “As an institution of higher learning, MIT has a responsibility to the truth higher than promoting for sainthood an individual who lined the institution’s pockets,” Hiltzik wrote.  He continued:

“Few humans have done so much to dismantle the public’s trust in science and to undermine political action on the climate crisis,” says Geoffrey Supran, an MIT PhD who is the former leader of the advocacy group Fossil Free MIT and currently a research associate at Harvard.  “MIT is a bastion of knowledge,” Supran says, “yet when it comes to global warming politics and the fossil fuel industry, my alma mater exhibits a shocking combination of ignorance, ambivalence and naiveté — and its press release about David Koch is a case in point.”

Supran says MIT has become embroiled in what he and his colleague Ben Franta label the fossil fuel industry’s invisible colonization of academia: “a nationwide conflict of interest with the industry that has the most to lose from action on climate change.  The result is that citadels of science like MIT are going out of their way to turn a blind eye to evidence by not standing up against climate denial and delay and by refusing to divest from an industry incompatible with the science of stopping climate collapse.” . . .

MIT has come under fire before for its coziness with the Koch network.  It’s “time for MIT to kick its Koch habit,” Sam Shames, a 2014 alumnus, wrote on Medium in 2016.

“You can acknowledge that the money that David Koch gave to help solve cancer is really good, while also acknowledging that he did other things that are really not good,” Shames told me Monday.  “But just to ignore the hard part of what this person chose to do with his money — that’s not the institute I’m proud to graduate from.” . . .

MIT showed its gratitude for Koch’s blandishments by offering him positive reinforcement.  As the Washington Post reported, at the 2011 dedication of the cancer facility he funded he said: “I read stuff about me and I say, ‘God, I’m a terrible guy.’  And then I come here and everybody treats me like I’m a wonderful fellow, and I say, ‘Well, maybe I’m not so bad after all.’”

One need not speculate about Koch’s motivations in funding cancer research (he was a long-term prostate cancer patient), a campus child-care center or the basketball coach’s salary in order to observe that there’s a long tradition of wealthy families using philanthropic good works to paper over the dark sides of their past. . . .

It’s also true, however, that an institution can’t always suppress the implications of its relationships with bad actors forever.  Not a few universities are trying today to come to terms with honors granted to donors or alumni whose records don’t bear the scrutiny of the present.  “My fear is that if MIT does not speak out soon,” Shames wrote in 2016, “we will one day look back at anything named Koch with the same unease and shame as Princeton and Yale now view their buildings named after documented racists like Woodrow Wilson and John Calhoun.” . . .

Shames says he was especially struck by the final sentence of the MIT obituary, which called Koch “truly a son of MIT who made the Institute a better place.”

“Essentially, they were willing to let him fund an agenda that makes the world a worse place,” Shames observed, “in exchange for making MIT better.  As an alumnus, that makes me really sad.”

Ironically, on Friday — the day of Koch’s death and the MIT obit — MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote a letter to the faculty disclosing that MIT had received $800,000 in donations from foundations controlled by Epstein, the sex trafficker.  It’s now well known that Epstein cultivated a vast network of superstar scientists and other thinkers as acquaintances.  As the Boston Globe put it, “The relationships seem to have been fundamentally transactional.  Pedigree thinkers and scholars provided vast intellectual capital.  Epstein provided capital in the more traditional sense — seed money for their projects— with travel on Epstein’s private jet, or trips to his private island sometimes included.”

Epstein’s donations to Harvard — to which he pledged $30 million, but actually donated around $6 million — were far more extensive.  But the price paid by MIT has still been steep.  At the MIT Media Lab two prominent researchers severed ties this month to protest Epstein’s patronage.  Calls are mounting for the lab’s director, Joi Ito, to resign.  “Ito was forced to publicly apologize for taking Epstein’s money both on behalf of the lab and for his own projects outside of it,” the Globe reports.  “It didn’t help that some of those investments had never been disclosed before publicly.  Or that a substantial part of the money had been donated subsequent to Epstein’s 2008 conviction in Florida for soliciting a minor for prostitution.”

In his letter to the faculty Reif called acceptance of the donations “a mistake in judgment” and pledged to “identify any lessons for the future, to review our current processes” and to consider “appropriate ways we might improve them.”  He pledged to commit an equivalent sum to organizations benefiting Epstein’s victims, or other victims of sexual abuse, which if it happens would be a good first step.

“This episode should prompt some real soul-searching at MIT — and especially at the Media Lab, where academic work and entrepreneurship go hand in glove,” the Globe report concludes.  “While Epstein is obviously an extreme example of a bad benefactor, this terrain is rife with the potential for ugly conflicts.  Just how rife is now becoming clear.” 

Indeed it is.  For the problem isn’t MIT or, for that matter, the Kochs, Epstein, the Sackler family, or any other tainted individual donors.  It’s about the failure to recognize higher education as a common good, whether publicly or privately financed.  As AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum wrote last year in the aftermath of disclosures of irregularities in Koch donations to George Mason University, “The public defunding of higher education has already generated a host of terrible consequences.  If politically motivated donors pick up the slack, things will only get worse.  Higher education can’t function properly when it is beholden to special interests.  That bodes ill not just for colleges themselves.  It bodes ill for our democracy.”