Ten years ago, the Charles Koch Foundation gave three grants to George Mason University to help hire faculty members in its economics department. Those professors have won teaching awards, gained international recognition for their research, and helped expand a thriving graduate-student fellowship program.
You’d be forgiven if you missed that story in recent media coverage. In fact, news stories haven’t mentioned those facts at all. Instead they have focused on provisions in long-expired grant agreements that allowed a donor representative to serve on a five-person search committee that recommended candidates for the positions. After the search committee did its work, the normal faculty-hiring process kicked in.
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Another view: Here’s Why Politically Motivated Philanthropy Is Dangerous
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A quick Google search reveals that many institutions still allow similar donor involvement. We stopped including this provision in our grant agreements years ago because we wanted to make our commitment to academic independence absolutely clear.
How can you be sure we’re serious? It’s easy: We’ve posted our grant-agreement template online.
What’s more, dozens of our active grant agreements have been made public as a result of state open-records requests. That includes the two most recent major contributions to George Mason. In fact, the Charles Koch Foundation might be the most highly scrutinized university donor in the country.
We aren’t claiming to be perfect. But the thousands of pages of documents that have been released over the years contain no smoking guns. If anything, they’re revealing for what they don’t show.
The narrative that is being put forward about our giving makes no sense. The notion that the foundation would attach strings to our grants to force professors to think certain thoughts or come to certain conclusions is false, as well as unfair to the professors we support. The logic really breaks down when you consider that more than 350 universities and several hundred professors, studying everything from criminal-justice reform to free speech in the digital age, would all have to be in on the conspiracy. Whatever you may think about the Charles Koch Foundation, that just doesn’t add up.
But logic doesn’t stop the groups that have organized to intimidate those who receive our support. Make no mistake: Scholars, students, and the ideas they bring to their campuses are the real targets.
Consider the evidence. Groups that claim to be disinterested advocates for transparency are conspicuously light on records requests for any other source of university support, even though the Charles Koch Foundation accounts for less than 1 percent of the over $40 billion in annual college philanthropy. One wonders what they might find if all organizations were held to these same standards.
We are committed to supporting colleges because they are an essential contributor to a thriving society. They’re where students learn to be critical thinkers and where scholars have the freedom to study society’s most pressing problems. Our grants are intended to reinforce an atmosphere of open inquiry and respectful challenge that is essential to the development of new ideas. A careful look at the groups behind the records requests, the surreptitious taping of academic conferences, the highly selective culling of email dumps, and the misinformation campaigns to faculty senates reveals that these activists disagree with ideas put forward by some of the professors we support. But rather than discuss those ideas openly, the activists seek to silence them.
All giving should be held to the same standards. We hold ourselves to the following code of conduct in our college grant-making, and we invite our partners to do the same: (1) We respect the institutions’ governance and follow all of their standard procedures; (2) We have no say in faculty hiring or evaluation or in what is taught or researched; (3) We make grants to fulfill a scholar’s vision, and include her proposal in our grant agreements to ensure that she is able to guide the direction and focus of her work even if the college administration changes; (4) We publicly announce major grants when we make them.
We’re open to further improvement of those standards. As we’ve done periodically in the past, we are actively seeking input from our college partners on this point.
Meanwhile, we ask that people look past the innuendo and examine the facts of our philanthropy. We know what they’ll find: Hundreds of professors doing what good professors do — exploring crucial issues, following their passions, and doing so with integrity.
John Hardin is director of university relations at the Charles Koch Foundation.