Think You Know What Type of College Would Accept Charles Koch Foundation Money? Think Again.

Montana State University at Bozeman, a campus burdened by budget cuts and tuition increases in a very red state, seemed like an institution that might welcome a $5.7-million gift from the Charles Koch Foundation.

Gerrit Egnew, a senior majoring in biological engineering, had other ideas.

Aware of the foundation’s reputation for funding politically tinged work at other U.S. campuses, Mr. Egnew joined other MSU students and faculty last month in disrupting plans for a new economics-research center that was to use the foundation’s money. They’re also demanding new gift-acceptance policies on a campus already dotted with donor-sponsored buildings and departments. “Student involvement is growing, and growing fast,” he said.

Across the country at Harvard University, it’s a different story. The nation’s oldest university has prestige to spare and a $37-billion endowment. Yet it just teamed with the neighboring Massachusetts Institute of Technology to accept a new $3.7 million Koch grant.

If there’s a template for the kind of institution seen as most likely to receive Koch funding, it would be a public regional university with a tight budget and ambition to grow — the kind of ambition a Koch gift can help satisfy. But the cases of Montana State and Harvard reveal that there’s more to the complex and longstanding involvement in higher education of Charles G. Koch, the multibillionaire head of a petrochemical conglomerate whose political activism aims to sharply limit government, especially in areas such as health care and the environment.

Formed in 1980 to formalize Mr. Koch’s educational investments, the Charles Koch Foundation last year awarded $77 million, including $50 million in grants to 249 colleges. The foundation said it expects its total giving to reach $120 million this year.

Increasingly its college grants have supported the creation of on-campus academic centers focused on a particular topic. Often that topic involves economics, and often a faculty member seen as sympathetic to Mr. Koch’s vision directs research topics and the selection of faculty and students.

The foundation’s latest annual filing shows its giving remains robust, especially among more renowned institutions like Harvard and MIT. According to an analysis of the foundation’s latest annual financial disclosures by UnKoch My Campus, a watchdog group that opposes the foundation’s campus inroads, the $50 million represents a 49-percent jump from 2015, when the Charles Koch Foundation gave out $34 million in grants. The 249 campuses at which anyone at the institution has received some money represent another record high, up from 222 in 2015, according to the group.

The reputational heft of that list keeps improving. After a period of concentrating its biggest gifts among mostly smaller regional institutions, the Koch foundation’s top partners — those getting at least $100,000 a year — now include the likes of Purdue, the University of Notre Dame, Harvard, Brown, New York, and Georgetown Universities, the University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State, the University of North Carolina, Stanford, the University of Michigan, Duke, UCLA, the University of Chicago and MIT.

An Evolving Strategy?

On the other hand, resistance has coalesced on many campuses, especially after faculty members from several universities were recorded at a conference last year enthusiastically acknowledging the political power that Koch foundation money has given them at their institutions. The foundation ended the year adding only 44 first-time campuses, falling below the average gain of the previous five years for the second straight time. And with 69 campuses dropping off Koch’s list in 2016, it was also the second straight year in which the foundation lost more campuses than it added.

The declines suggest that some campus efforts to oppose Koch money have borne fruit, said Ralph Wilson, one of the founders of UnKoch My Campus, which secretly recorded the faculty statements at conference sessions and has now compiled summaries of the latest Koch foundation donor data. Yet over all, Mr. Wilson said, the shifts in Koch’s donor patterns — including its growing inroads among elite institutions — more likely indicates that the foundation has evolved and adapted, even as opposition toughens on some campuses.

“It makes sense that Koch is expanding on prestigious beachhead campuses to legitimize their programs,” Mr. Wilson said. “But the more that faculty know about Koch’s contracts and strategy, the more they are trying to resist its influence.”

A spokeswoman for the Koch foundation, however, cautioned against making too much of the foundation’s list of 2016 grant recipients, as Koch works with “schools of all types and sizes.” The spokeswoman, Trice Jacobson, said that absences of funding for any particular campus in any given year can be temporary, not indicative of a broader strategy. “The shifts in calendar-year giving are part of the natural academic giving cycle,” she said. “Our vision is to support any school that has exciting opportunities for professors and students.”

Mr. Koch and his brother, David H. Koch, own Koch Industries, which operates oil refineries and pipelines and owns an assortment of consumer-goods producers. They’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars on political campaigns to advance the interests of the fossil-fuel industry, challenge the science of climate change, and promote smaller government and fewer regulations of all types. They are a guiding force behind Donors Trust, a fund that lets allies anonymously make and coordinate large political donations, and — according to Mr. Wilson’s group — is itself now getting more involved in funding universities.

At the same time, the Kochs extensively finance medical research and the arts, and they promote some political positions that transcend conservative politics or are typically associated with the political left. Those include criminal-justice reform — the Kochs have emphasized high incarceration rates among lower-income youth as a problem — and opposition to U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts.

And while the foundation clearly courts conservative academics and students, it does not support them exclusively. “I would rely on the scholars to determine best what issues they’re going to pursue, what research they’re going to do, and what they’re going to do with that research,” John C. Hardin, the foundation’s director of university relations, told The Chronicle last year. “Our place is just to provide the funding so that they’re able to do it.”

Grant recipients are judged, generally, by whether they reach a goal they set, such as numbers of students enrolling in a class or attending a speech, or the number of research publications tied to a grant, Mr. Hardin said. “We do not read the work, typically, that they have produced,” he said. “We might in some cases, but that’s not a standard practice of any kind.”

‘Resources to Be Leveraged’

In many cases, terms of Koch foundation agreements have not been disclosed, fueling suspicions about intent, and protests. The faculty at Wake Forest University voted this year to oppose a $3.7-million Koch grant to create the Eudaimonia Institute — a center for studying “human flourishing” — in large part because the university had not permitted faculty members to view the Koch donor agreement, making it difficult for them to assess any ideological component. (The institute went ahead anyway.)

Some scholars’ suspicions were stoked last year by recordings and transcripts, released by UnKoch My Campus, of the April conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, an annual gathering point for Koch-backed academics.

Those academics included Stephen C. Miller, an associate professor of economics at Troy University, who recommended using Koch funding to move ideological allies into places of power on campus, calling faculty positions “resources to be leveraged.” A Troy colleague, George R. Crowley, then chair of the economics department, said: “We’ve had an administration that has kind of let us get away with a lot, as far as hiring people very rapidly and ramming through some of the curricular kind of stuff.”

Documents obtained by various campus-based student groups have outlined similar attempts to disguise the intent of donations that the Koch foundation has publicly described only as promoting free academic inquiry. After University of Kansas students obtained records of the grant-solicitation exchanges of Arthur P. Hall, a business-school lecturer, Mr. Hall acknowledged that his study of local population shifts was designed to “promote smaller government” by casting doubt on the use of taxpayer money to guide economic growth.

“I was writing it, obviously, to a particular constituent,” Mr. Hall, a former Koch Industries economist and executive director of his university’s Koch-funded Brandmeyer Center for Applied Economics, told The Chronicle of his grant proposal.

The University of Kansas and Troy University are among the dozens of campuses that received Koch foundation money in the past but not in 2016. In addition, Mr. Crowley was removed as chairman of Troy’s economics department. Troy’s chancellor, Jack Hawkins Jr., had cheered Koch’s arrival on campus in 2010, saying the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy that Koch helped create “opens a whole new avenue of opportunity in terms of study for our students and faculty.” After hearing the comments from Mr. Miller and Mr. Crowley, Mr. Hawkins ordered a refocusing of the Johnson center. “We don’t just turn people loose to operate at their own devices,” he told Alabama.com in 2016.

‘Letting Them Work It All Out’

Harvard leaders declined to comment on their decision to work with the Koch foundation. At both MIT and Montana State University, officials who helped arrange the Koch donations said they saw no risk to their institutions’ academic integrity.

Wendy A. Stock, a Montana State economics professor who would be a co-director of the proposed economics-research center, said normal university procedures would be used to hire two tenure-track professors for the center. The signed contract obtained by other faculty members and media groups also stipulates that faculty selection would follow “normal procedures;” it also makes clear that Ms. Stock and another economics professor would have authority over all center governance issues, including “selection of personnel.”

In the contract, MSU agrees to keep confidential “the existence of or contents of this agreement without express written approval from the donor, except as otherwise may be required by law.” A Montana State spokesman said tenured faculty, while rarely fired, have no guarantee of long-term employment, and he said requests to see the contract are granted, as required by state law. The Faculty Senate voted 24 to 5 last month to postpone indefinitely any action on the proposal to create the center.

The Koch contract with Harvard and MIT, both private institutions, has not been made public. The universities described the $3.7-million gift as benefiting foreign-policy work at the MIT security-studies program and at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The director of the MIT program, Barry R. Posen, a professor of political science overseeing the Koch grant along with Stephen M. Walt of Harvard, said the donation posed no significant risk of politicizing the program’s work. “Let’s face it, if you know the kinds of things that Steve Walt writes, and the kinds of things that I write, you can guess why the Charles Koch Foundation was enthusiastic about supporting us,” he said, noting that he and Mr. Koch share a noninterventionist approach to foreign policy.

Yet Mr. Posen, who has a personal history of supporting Democrats, said he understood that virtually any donation to a university can carry political implications. That’s especially true, he said, when foundations are relatively young.

“They will learn in their negotiations with academia and universities,” Mr. Posen said of foundations with political agendas, “how much of that they can expect to achieve in light of the ideals and rules that liberal universities have.”

Eric S. Chivian, an emeritus assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard and a co-winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in preventing nuclear war, is much less sanguine. Research has shown over and over that funding sources create biases, both overt and subtle, no matter how confident a recipient might be in his or her ability to resist, Dr. Chivian said.

Even if wealthy institutions like Harvard and MIT are uniquely well-positioned to resist political pressure on their research, he said, their actions set a tone for others.

Explaining his acceptance of Koch support, John D. Graham, dean of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University at Bloomington, said last year that prominent institutions like MIT seem to be able to do it without suffering any reputational harm.

At Montana State, the stakes are higher than at places like Harvard and MIT. The state legislature last month told the Montana University System to expect $4.5 million in budget cuts. The Bozeman campus, in trying to cope, is naming not just buildings but schools, departments, and other components after multimillion-dollar donors. They include the Gianforte School of Computing, renamed after an $8-million pledge from Gregory R. Gianforte, an advocate of creationism and purported backer of antigay activism who assaulted a reporter during his successful campaign for Congress as a Republican this past May.

Mr. Egnew, the senior, said he’s among several MSU science students who are working to oppose not just the Koch grant proposal but the trend toward private money in public education. Total private support for U.S. university research exceeded $33 billion last year, just below total federal support of almost $39 billion, according to the latest annual data issued last month by the National Science Foundation. That public-private gap has narrowed steadily since federal funding was double the level of private support back in the 1980s.

Mr. Hardin, of the Koch foundation, disputes any suggestions that its money buys academic influence. Koch is “just providing funding to this variety of people and then letting them work it all out,” he said. “What happens on their side of the fence, so to speak, within the university community — we’re not a part of that.”

But Mr. Egnew said that he sees colleges’ growing reliance on private money as a serious threat to science. Serious enough, in fact, that he might postpone his pursuit of a career in biological engineering to continuing fighting private interests. “The trend for 30 years has been toward more private funding,” he said. “And we’d like to reverse that trend.”

Shifting Allegiances
The number of U.S. colleges and universities that have stopped receiving funding from the Koch Foundation has, for the second straight year, exceeded the number of first-year recipients of the foundation’s support.

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.