Koch Money Brings Distress Over a University’s Well-Being Institute

For a place that takes its name from a Greek word for happiness, the new Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University certainly generates its share of tension and worry.

The unease stems not from anything the institute has yet done, but from its chief source of financial support: a $3.7-million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation, a major bankroller of university programs that promote libertarianism and faith in the free market.

The foundation’s involvement has aroused enough ire in the Faculty Senate that it appears likely this month to call for an overhaul of the university’s gift-agreement policies, to require much more faculty oversight.

The Senate has already urged the university to cease and prohibit any Koch financing of its centers or institutes, warning in a resolution passed last month that the foundation seeks “to co-opt higher education for its ideological, political, and financial ends.”

Rogan Kersh, the university’s provost, says he is open to discussing the Senate’s concerns but will not acquiesce to faculty demands that he disclose the contents of the Koch agreement, which remains confidential. “If there was some improper influence hinted at or present in a gift agreement, we wouldn’t sign it,” he says.

The Eudaimonia Institute controversy has pitted faculty members against one another. While opponents of the Koch agreement are urging the administration to comply with last month’s resolution right away, others, who support it, are accusing those who wish to block it of censorship.

Many Wake Forest faculty members, as well as some students and alumni, express fear that the Eudaimonia Institute will function like the ancient Greeks’ Trojan Horse, providing cover for a Koch effort to promote a political agenda associated less with Aristotle than with Ayn Rand. Susan Harlan, an associate professor of English, has publicized such fears in biting satirical poems published on Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. In one she writes:

“Eudaimonia” is Greek for “This university
Is run by corporate stooges
And is doomed.”

Among the agreement’s defenders, J. Daniel Hammond, chairman of Wake Forest’s economics department and a member of the new institute’s advisory board, says he has “no concerns about the institute whatsoever.” He dismisses the opposition to the foundation’s support of colleges as “part of a neo-Marxist ideological agenda,” whose adherents believe “intellectual life is power, and the campus is a battleground.”

As for the foundation itself, John Hardin, a spokesman, last week issued a statement that called the effort to block the creation of the Koch-financed institute “a dangerous precedent for scholarship broadly.”

Favorable Conditions

The concept of eudaimonia, which also can be translated as “well-being” or “flourishing,” factors prominently into the writings of Aristotle. Wake Forest’s Eudaimonia Institute, which opened last fall and plans to hold its first national conference this month, describes itself as dedicated to interdisciplinary research and teaching focused on human flourishing and the institutions that support it.

The institute itself has grown substantially in its scope and ambitions since its conception, by James Otteson, a professor of political economy and executive director of the university’s BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism, which was established with a bank foundation’s grant.

Mr. Otteson initially envisioned the study of eudaimonia as a center project, but found himself encouraged to think in bigger terms by Mr. Kersh, the provost. Mr. Kersh argued that the broader, interdisciplinary study of eudaimonia could provide an intellectual underpinning to a new Wake Forest effort to promote wellness on its campus.

Wake Forest already had established interdisciplinary institutes devoted to the humanities and to the promotion of social justice, in keeping with a strategic plan that envisioned such institutes as a means to reinforce ties between the university’s academic programs and professional schools. Mr. Otteson formally applied for Koch Foundation support for a Eudaimonia Institute in December 2014, and the university announced the Koch grant last September.

Closing the Gate

Ulrike Wiethaus, a professor of religion who leads the university’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, says all three institutes arose in the absence of explicit university guidelines for their oversight and financial support.

In a report that it plans to submit to the Faculty Senate this month, her committee, she says, will argue that the university was caught off guard in dealing with the innovative approach to higher-education philanthropy that the Koch Foundation brought to the table.

Rather than simply bestowing funds upon colleges for causes it regards as worthy, she alleges, the foundation seeks to use its money to foster change at institutions receiving those dollars. It offers financial inducements to hire faculty members with conservative or libertarian views, and retains influence over colleges by leaving them dependent on its largess to continue covering instructors’ salaries.

A separate ad hoc committee charged by the Faculty Senate with studying the Eudaimonia Institute agreement has similarly accused the Koch Foundation of pursuing a hidden political agenda, basing such assertions heavily on the work of the journalist Jane Mayer, in her book Dark Money and elsewhere. The Koch Foundation declined last week to respond to such allegations.

Because Wake Forest’s policies failed to anticipate that donors might take such an approach, Ms. Wiethaus says, “we are now in a situation in which we need to really almost backpedal.”

Among her committee’s recommendations will be a call for Wake Forest’s administration to require institutes to publicly disclose all donors. The panel also will urge the Senate to demand faculty oversight of institutes’ finances, hiring decisions, and compliance with accreditation standards.

The committee also will propose limits on how long institutes’ directors can hold those positions. Mr. Otteson, who was named as his institute’s executive director in June, currently serves renewable three-year terms.

Some of the committee’s recommendations are inspired by steps taken at Western Carolina University in response to controversy over a Koch-financed center. The Wake Forest committee’s proposal treads new ground, however, in how much it seeks to institutionalize a faculty role in the university’s discussions with donors.

“We want to create a model,” Ms. Wiethaus says. “We want to make sure that, next time around, we have a cleaner process in place.”

Questions of Independence

The Eudaimonia Institute declares on its website that it already operates under multiple layers of protection of its academic freedom and integrity. They include its faculty advisory board, appointed by its executive director in consultation with Wake Forest’s provost and deans. That board oversees the institute’s review of grant and program proposals, and helps review its executive director annually.

A “Declaration of Research Independence,” adopted by the advisory board in June 2015, holds that the institute will tell prospective donors it “maintains sole discretion over its sponsored research and educational activities.”

Critics of the institute argue that the board’s advisory status renders it toothless in enforcing such academic-freedom protections.

Randall G. Rogan, a professor of communication and member of the institute’s advisory board, calls the debate over the institute unfortunate because he hoped his colleagues would be “celebrating this opportunity for another perspective to be represented on campus.”

Another advisory-board member, Ana S. Iltis, a professor of philosophy and director of the university’s Center for Bioethics, plans to use an institute grant to study how unarticulated assumptions about human flourishing influence judgments about human research and experimentation involving large-scale surgical transplants. She says researchers “are not often able to go out and get significant grant support for that kind of work.”

Fears of the Unknown

The Faculty Senate set in motion two reviews of the Eudaimonia Institute agreement — by its ad hoc panel and by the university’s academic-freedom committee — in response to a November petition signed by 189 of the university’s roughly 720 faculty members.

Along with raising suspicions about the Koch Foundation’s motives, the petition challenged the idea that the institute’s intellectual foundation is ideologically neutral, arguing that references to human flourishing and well-being are common on the websites of Koch-financed efforts to study free enterprise.

As his ambitions for eudaimonia research expanded from a business-center project to a broader interdisciplinary institute, Mr. Otteson expanded the undertaking to look well beyond business and finance, and to apply considerations of human flourishing to studies of government, culture, and the arts.

Nevertheless, the institute’s operating agreement with Wake Forest’s administration highlights potential research topics that align with free marketers’ concerns, including studies of entrepreneurship, capitalism, corporations, and trade.

Fueling faculty suspicions of the institute’s true agenda is the university’s refusal to let faculty representatives review the Koch donor agreement, even in a private setting with safeguards to keep its contents from being disseminated.

“This lack of transparency is deeply troubling,” the Faculty Senate’s ad hoc panel on the agreement said in a report issued last month. The report says that being unable to see the agreement precluded the panel from answering questions such as whether the document required Mr. Otteson to be named as the institute’s director.

Mr. Kersh said Wake Forest regards all such agreements as confidential legal documents, and is not about to make an exception.

Stewart Carter, a professor of music and the Faculty Senate’s vice president, says that the refusal to allow scrutiny of the agreement “has opened up a breach between the faculty and the administration,” which previously enjoyed good relations.

Mr. Otteson and some members of the institute’s advisory board express doubt that other faculty members would care about the agreement if not for their dislike of Charles Koch’s prominence as a Republican donor and advocate of libertarian causes such as business deregulation.

The Eudaimonia Institute’s broad focus, which its supporters see as a strength in terms of promoting interdisciplinary activity, is being seized upon by its detractors as reason for skepticism.

Joseph A. Soares, a professor of sociology, says the institute’s mission “is so vague it could encompass anything and everything.”

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