How One College Quelled Controversy Over a Koch-Financed Center

David Oppenheimer

Western Carolina University stood on the brink of a battle with its faculty after it announced plans last fall to take $2 million from the Charles Koch Foundation to establish a Center for the Study of Free Enterprise. The Faculty Senate overwhelmingly adopted a statement criticizing the gift agreement as a threat to both academic freedom and the university’s reputation.

The free-market-oriented Koch Foundation fueled tensions by requesting copies of any university emails about the agreement that were covered by open-records requests from local newspapers. The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a conservative think tank, separately filed open-records requests for the emails of several faculty members critical of the agreement.

The controversy threatened to make the center a source of campus tension for years to come. Faculty resistance at a few other institutions, including Amherst College and Yale University, has derailed past efforts to open similar centers or programs devoted to promoting conservative, traditionalist, or free-market-oriented ideas.

George Mason University, in Virginia, remains the target of protests months after agreeing to take money from the Koch Foundation and an anonymous donor if it renamed its law school for the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

When Western Carolina signed a final version of the agreement last month, however, the news was greeted with remarkable calm. In the eyes of many faculty members, the pact had gone from posing an imminent threat to their institution to being tolerable. The university’s administration had revised the document with provisions intended to reassure faculty members that their voices had been heard and their worst fears about the center were unlikely to be realized anytime soon.

“The administration really listened,” says Weiguo (Bill) Yang, an associate professor of engineering who is chairman of Western Carolina’s Faculty Senate.

‘A Compromise Document’

Laura Wright, a professor of English who was a target of the Pope Center’s open-records requests for faculty emails discussing the Koch agreement, argues that some faculty members are now too intimidated to openly express their continued unhappiness with it. Nonetheless, in reviewing the agreement’s revisions, she says, “what has been done is positive” and helps ensure the Koch Foundation “cannot do an end-around” to circumvent the faculty’s will.

“It is a compromise document, to be sure,” observes Anita Levy, a senior program officer in the American Association of University Professors’ department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance. The AAUP has criticized other such agreements as threats to colleges’ independence and academic integrity.

Ideally, Ms. Levy says, “we would not have universities taking money from the Koch brothers’ foundation at all.” But, she says, she believes the association should approach the Western Carolina agreement with “a wait-and-see attitude,” to see if the faculty oversight built into it keeps the center from running afoul of AAUP guidelines.

Even Ralph Wilson, a senior researcher for the anti-Koch advocacy group UnKoch My Campus, offered the agreement a measure of grudging praise, describing it to a local newspaper, the Smoky Mountain News, as the least egregious he had seen.

“Our bottom line is that this agreement still allows Koch to retain control in ways that we feel are completely unacceptable,” Mr. Wilson says. Nevertheless, he says, Western Carolina’s faculty members pushed back against Koch Foundation influence much more successfully than their counterparts at other colleges. “They made considerable advances and cut several strings that usually come with such agreements.”

What defused the controversy? The following moves by the administration appeared to play a key role:

1. Giving the faculty a big say.

Western Carolina initially seemed to steamroll faculty critics of the proposed center. Its administration got the university’s Board of Trustees to approve a proposed charter for the center last December, just over a month after the Faculty Senate overwhelmingly objected to that agreement. Weeks later, however, David O. Belcher, the university’s chancellor, stepped back and expressed a willingness to give the faculty more of a voice in the matter.

Chancellor Belcher declared that, out of an abundance of caution, he would subject the planned Koch center to the review of a faculty committee, as required by university policy with gifts that more obviously have curricular implications. “In hindsight,” he said, “it occurs to me that faculty needed more time to grapple with this, to talk about it, to discuss it.” He said he wished the university had taken such an approach in the first place, because doing so would have allayed concerns “that we were rushing toward a predetermined course.”

A faculty panel led by Mr. Yang of the Faculty Senate went to work, hammering out revisions in the agreement to make it more palatable. One of its innovations was ensuring the faculty’s say over the center in the long term, through the creation of an oversight board of faculty and community members. That board will be charged with ensuring that the center complies with the revised charter agreement and its protections of academic freedom.

“It is in the hands of these people to really stay vigilant,” Mr. Yang says, referring to the board and those involved with the center.

2. Thrusting the agreement into daylight.

Copies of the Koch Foundation’s agreements with colleges often are tough to come by. Many include a provision barring both the college and the foundation from disclosing their contents — or even their existence — unless they are legally required to do so or have the foundation’s approval.

A provision in the revised agreement between Western Carolina, its affiliated nonprofit foundation, and the Koch Foundation makes clear that it is a public document to be made available to anyone requesting it.

The revised agreement also has a provision stipulating that each of its signatories must review and approve any proposed publicity regarding the Koch donation. But giving all involved a say over spin is a far cry from swearing them to secrecy.

3. Limiting the Koch Foundation’s influence.

Several provisions of the Western Carolina agreement serve to limit either the Koch Foundation’s influence on the center or the center’s influence on the state as a whole.

For example, the agreement stipulates that none of the parties involved shall infringe on academic freedom, as defined by the university and by a University of North Carolina system policy that emphasizes academic independence and integrity.

Other colleges’ agreements with the Koch Foundation have included the foundation’s own definition of academic freedom, which emphasizes promoting the diversity of ideas — a goal clearly important to centers and programs that see themselves as counterweights to academe’s liberal and leftist forces. Many explicitly cited Charles Koch’s belief that academe should resemble a competitive marketplace in which the best scholars and ideas attract the most financial support.

The Western Carolina agreement also holds that decisions about the center’s curriculum, personnel, and activities “are the sole purview of the university’s faculty and administration.” It earmarks the funds that the Koch Foundation will provide for purposes other than the hiring of faculty members, helping to alleviate faculty fears of undue Koch influence on their institution.

The gift — $1.8 million over five years, slightly less than originally pledged — is to be used for administrative and support personnel, research, student scholarships, educational programs, and student and faculty travel.

The agreement also says that the Koch gift will not be used to influence legislation, elections, or political campaigns.

The Koch Foundation retains the right to terminate the agreement, with 30 days’ notice, if it decides its money is being used in ways that do not further the center’s mission of studying and discussing “the role of free enterprise in a flourishing society,” and providing research and leadership related to economic development.

Mr. Wilson of UnKoch My Campus describes such a provision as “a form of very aggressive implicit control,” creating a clear financial incentive for those affiliated with the center to keep the foundation happy.

Edward J. Lopez, a professor of economics who helped land the foundation gift and has been named as the new center’s director, said in a written statement: “It’s been a privilege to work alongside my colleagues from across campus. The process we hammered out is a model for other centers and institutes, on our campus and beyond.”

John Hardin, director of university relations at the Koch Foundation, says all of its agreements with colleges are different and “reflect the unique priorities, interests, and visions of the schools.”

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.

Clarification (10/4/2016, 1:21 p.m.): This article has been updated to reflect that the Koch Foundation did not itself submit open-records requests seeking university emails about the gift agreement, but instead asked for those documents released to others in response to such requests.