How George Mason Will Take the Controversy Out of Its Gift Agreements

Julian Berger, GMU Fourth Estate

News reports on a controversy regarding some past gift agreements at George Mason University have focused on three important, interrelated, yet distinct issues: a demand for increased transparency in agreements between the university and its private donors; opposition to accepting gifts from donors of a given political persuasion; and the question of what rights are appropriate for a university to grant donors.

We ought to be responsive to the first, stand firm against the second, and bring additional clarity to the third as a means of facilitating the other two.

The controversy was triggered by the recent discovery of donor agreements that were accepted by George Mason between 2003 and 2011 in support of the economics department, and which afforded donors some influence in faculty selection and review. All but one of those agreements had expired by the time they were made public, as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request, and the one that still had some pending payments has since been voided, with the donor agreeing to transfer the balance of the pledged gift for general support of the university.

Except for the oldest one, the agreements stated that “the final say in all faculty appointments lies in specified GMU procedures.” The issue was that the agreements granted donors the right to participate in selection and evaluation committees, a circumstance that falls short of the standard of academic independence we should expect in every gift. Those provisions are no longer used in our gift agreements, yet the fact that some past agreements did include such terms raises the question of whether there may be others with similar provisions. In order to clear those doubts, we are conducting a thorough review of all active gift agreements involving faculty appointments.

The publication of the controversial gift agreements has amplified the voices demanding open access to the agreements between the university and its private donors. Leaving aside legal issues being addressed in court as to whether the university foundation, which is a private institution, should be subject to FOIA (my view is that it should not), I agree that public access to gift agreements would increase accountability and help dispel doubts about the nature of the university’s relationships with donors. That is why we made public a recent $5-million gift from the Charles Koch Foundation as well as the 2016 naming gifts to the Antonin Scalia Law School.

We are committed to making this level of transparency our norm, so long as we do not compromise our donors’ legal rights to privacy. Donors, for example, may wish to remain anonymous, or they may request privacy about how they wish to satisfy their pledge or transfer property to the university foundation. As a general principle, however, I agree wholeheartedly that we shall provide as much information as possible. And the current debate highlights the need to accelerate changes.

Other critics go beyond the demand for transparency and disapprove of the university’s accepting gifts from donors of a specific political ideology. Some, most notably the supporters of the “UnKoch My Campus” movement, are explicit about their goal. These demands are troubling. The idea that we ought to apply an ideological litmus test to determine who may or may not donate to the university would run counter to the tenets of academic freedom. The suggestion that we should keep certain conservative donors away only helps intensify the growing concern that colleges are ideologically one-sided. We must stand firm against internal and external pressures to reject gifts for ideological reasons and be proud of our diversity and inclusion, not only of people, but also of ideas.

Our responsibility must be to ensure that any gift agreement, no matter who the donor is, provides adequate protection against undue influence in academic affairs. Outside of academia, allowing donors to participate in the business of the charity organization they support is a common and effective form of cultivation and stewardship. In contrast, colleges must balance the benefits of good donor stewardship with the need to preserve the academic freedom and decision-making independence of the faculty. As a general principle, a donor may fund a professorship that is restricted to a specific discipline (e.g., experimental economics or Mesoamerican anthropology) but may not determine what professors the college hires or tenures, or what any professor may teach or publish.

In practice, though, policies as to what constitutes excessive donor involvement in academic affairs are vague and vary by institution, thus leaving ample room for judgment and controversy. For instance, the gift agreements we released are controversial in part because they allowed for representatives of the donors to participate in selection committees — yet some colleges explicitly allow for that possibility in their policies, and our own policies are silent on the matter.

I am forming a committee to review our existing gift agreements supporting faculty positions. It will also be asked to propose changes to our gift-acceptance policies that will bring more clarity to both donors and fund raisers as to the forms of donor engagement we are comfortable with. We must be mindful that all of our donors, large and small, are crucial in allowing us to deliver on our mission amid declining public funding. Every year we serve more students and are recognized as leaders across a wide variety of disciplines. This would not be possible without private support built upon our public foundation.

Ángel Cabrera is president of George Mason University.