To Court a Secretive Donor, Law Deans at George Mason Blasted Climate Scientists and Their Own Accreditor

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Leaders of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, which has been criticized for its ties to conservative donors, have spent years courting a wealthy Chicago philanthropist who has steered money toward organizations that promote skepticism of climate change or finance conservative and libertarian journalism on college campuses.

Newly released documents show the extent to which Barre Seid, the philanthropist, sought to engage law-school deans on hot-button political topics. On several occasions he raised alarms about political activism by climate scientists at George Mason, prompting assurances from the dean that “some of our friends on the board” were “all over it (behind the scenes).”

The documents, which include more than 800 pages of emails and other communications, were obtained through a public-records request filed by UnKoch My Campus, a national group that seeks to expose the Charles Koch Foundation’s influence on higher education.

In 2016, George Mason announced that it had received a $10 million grant from the Koch Foundation, along with $20 million from an anonymous donor, who asked that the law school be named in honor of Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice and a conservative icon. In a news release on Thursday, Allison Pienta, a lawyer working with UnKoch My Campus, argued that the documents she had obtained “prove that Mr. Seid is the Scalia Law donor.”

Pienta, who had requested records that contained the anonymous donor’s name, suspected that Seid had been the benefactor in part because people associated with him are referred to in a number of exchanges. She concluded that he was the donor after cross-referencing those emails with others that mention Seid by name.

Anne Holton, George Mason’s interim president, said in a letter to Pienta that the university could not “confirm or deny your conclusion” that Seid is the anonymous donor, “as universities have an obligation to respect a donor’s right to anonymity.”

After reviewing the records, which contained numerous redactions to protect donor privacy, The Chronicle could not independently verify the identity of the donor. What the records do show, however, is a yearslong, politically tinged dialogue between Seid and two successive deans of George Mason’s law school.

People who are concerned about undue donor influence often envision clear-cut quid pro quos or prescriptive gift agreements that grant wealthy people too much control over the academic enterprise. These documents imply a subtler form of influence, one in which a donor elevates concerns about a professor or a regulatory body just by passing information along to university decision makers.

An Activist Donor

As told through the documents, the story of Seid’s relationships with Daniel D. Polsby, former dean of the law school, and his successor, Henry N. Butler, begins at least nine years ago. By that time, Seid had already been working to transform a tiny part of the higher-education landscape. Through the Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation, he gave $825,000 to Shimer College, an institution that enrolled about 100 students and followed the Great Books curriculum. After the donation, several people with financial ties to Seid joined the college’s Board of Trustees, and a fierce battle over governance of the college followed.

(In 2017, Shimer was absorbed by North Central College, which added the Shimer Great Books School as an academic program).

Between 2011 and 2016, Seid had or had scheduled at least seven meetings with one or both of George Mason’s law deans.

The deans found in Seid an inquisitive communicator, particularly when it came to conservative causes. In 2012, for example, he wrote to Polsby asking for “any insight” into a new program, housed at George Mason, that was established by the former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis. The question was notable given Seid’s apparent interest in the politics of climate science. Inglis had been voted out of office two years earlier during his primary, largely because he supported a tax on carbon. Now he was being embraced by George Mason.

Inglis’s program, the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, was meant to “promote conservative solutions to America’s energy and climate challenges.” Polsby responded to Seid right away, appearing to distance himself and the law school from the program.

“Inglis’s new center is in a different college from us,” Polsby said. “The law school has no role and wasn’t asked before the announcement was made.”

The conversations at times took on an antiregulatory flavor. In one exchange with Seid, in 2013, Polsby launched into a broadside against the law school’s accrediting agency. The American Bar Association, he wrote, “has added all kinds of dubious nonsense in its accreditation standards.”

“Poking them in the eye,” Polsby continued, “would be a genuine pleasure.”

Seid seemed particularly curious about the powers of higher-education regulators. Who was to say whether a person could operate a school, he wondered? Did you need the state’s permission, he asked Polsby? Did you need accreditation?

The impetus for that discussion was a Chronicle article that said the state of Virginia was shutting down an unaccredited university.

‘Outrageous Behavior’

In 2015, the year Butler became dean, a controversy in climate science captured Seid’s attention. Butler assured the philanthropist that he, too, was aghast.

A group of 20 professors, including some at George Mason, signed a letter urging the Obama administration to open a racketeering investigation into fossil-fuel companies and their allies. The companies had “knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change,” the professors wrote, and could be investigated under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly known as RICO.

This wasn’t the professors’ idea. Several months earlier, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, had proposed the possibility of suing fossil-fuel companies under RICO, just as the Justice Department had done to Big Tobacco more than a decade earlier. Tobacco companies had engaged in a “massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public,” the department had argued. The same might be said of fossil-fuel companies, Senator Whitehouse wrote, which had sponsored climate-change research that contradicts peer-reviewed consensus.

Seid forwarded to Butler a blog post by Judith A. Curry, a high-profile skeptic of climate science and former chairwoman of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Curry wrote that “the consensus on human caused climate change is not as overwhelming as you seem to think.” She admonished the professors for engaging in “irresponsible advocacy,” accusing them of trying to “silence scientists that disagree with you.”

“Is it significant that 6 GMU guys,” Seid wrote to Butler, “were the originators” of the letter.

“This is really outrageous behavior,” Butler replied on September 18, 2015. “I do not know the GMU folks who signed the letter, but they should be embarrassed. I wonder if they really understand anything about RICO, which was the source of much abuse by prosecutors (and the plaintiffs’ bar in follow on private suits) until the Feds went totally crazy and criminalized almost all behavior (which meant there was less need to use conspiracy theories).”

A few weeks later, Seid forwarded to Butler another blog post on the same subject from Powerline, an outlet for conservative commentary.

“Not your problem — but. … ” Seid wrote to the dean.

The post, titled “An Instance of Warmist Corruption,” took aim at Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist at George Mason and the first signatory to the professors’ letter calling for a RICO investigation. The blog described Shukla as “remarkably well paid” and suggested some form of financial malfeasance on his part.

Shukla was one of the lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore Jr., in 2007.

Responding to the Powerline post, Butler assured Seid that powerful people at George Mason were involved with the matter.

“This is such absurd behavior,” Butler wrote to Seid on October 9, 2015. “Totally indefensible.

“Some of our friends on the board,” he continued, “are all over it (behind the scenes).”

That same month, George Mason began an internal audit of Shukla’s handling of grants, a university spokesman confirmed to The Chronicle.

By this time, Shukla had run smack into a political buzz saw. Lamar S. Smith, a Republican Congressman from Texas, had announced plans to investigate a nonprofit research group led by Shukla.

On November 5, 2015, Seid forwarded to Butler an email about Shukla from Joseph L. Bast, then the president of the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank. Seid’s foundation has donated at least $1 million to the institute, which rejects as “propaganda” the idea of scientific consensus on the causes and consequences of climate change. George Mason’s own “multimillionaire government trough-feeder,” Bast wrote, was finally being exposed.

In response to Seid, Butler wrote, “The president is freaking out about this,” referring to Ángel Cabrera, George Mason’s president at the time.

For climate scientists like Shukla, criticism often comes with the job. But the newly released emails, Shukla told The Chronicle, suggest that those attackers had the ear of George Mason’s Board of Visitors.

“The ferocity of their attack was totally expected,” Shukla said in an email. “The fact that these guys had access to GMU board members, as the emails show, that is very unusual.”

Michael Sandler, a spokesman for George Mason, told The Chronicle that George Mason’s audit “concluded no wrongdoing on the part of Professor Shukla.”

The Chronicle requested a copy of the audit, but George Mason officials said it was a personnel record and not subject to public-disclosure laws.

As for congressional scrutiny, a politically connected board member says he came to Shukla’s defense. Thomas M. Davis III, the rector of George Mason’s board and a former Republican congressman from Virginia, said in an interview on Tuesday that he had quietly urged Representative Smith not to call a public hearing.

“I said ‘Look, lay off this guy,’” Davis said. “I made it clear we stood behind him and they ought to lay off him, and they did. I met with Shukla and told him we supported him.

“When one of our professors is under attack, either from the right or the left, we are behind them,” Davis continued.

Butler, the dean, declined an interview request and did not answer specific questions from The Chronicle about his emails. In a statement, Butler said he had nothing to do with the university’s response to Shukla.

“I had no influence in this matter, nor did I attempt to exert any influence in this matter,” Butler’s statement reads. “I support academic freedom at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School and across the university. Academic freedom and an open marketplace of ideas, including room for robust debate, is the very foundation of higher learning.”

A spokeswoman for Tripp Lite, a manufacturing company where Seid served as president, did not respond to emails this week seeking comment from Seid, who did not respond to a phone message on Wednesday.

A University on the Defensive

For George Mason, the release of a new cache of documents related to donor influence marks a chapter in a continuing saga. For years the university has fought in courts of law and public opinion, defending its relationships with conservative philanthropists. Only recently, however, did the university acknowledge that it hasn’t always gotten it right.

Last year when Cabrera, then the university’s president, announced a review of George Mason’s gift-acceptance policies, he conceded that some of its grant agreements “fall short of the standards of academic independence.” The agreements gave donors opportunities to weigh in on faculty hiring and stated with some specificity what professors would study.

But donors can still keep their identities secret, making it difficult to discern their intent.

By channeling a gift through a third party, a donor can further obscure the source of the money. That appears to have happened at George Mason. Several of the newly released emails refer to Donors Trust, a nonprofit organization that, among other things, offers donors anonymity.

Donors Trust describes itself as a public charity that was created to work with donors who are “dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise.” Mother Jones described it as “the dark-money ATM of the right.” In her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Jane Mayer explained that donors could give to the fund, which in turn donated to conservative groups and, in effect, “erased the donors’ names from the money trail.”

That kind of opacity troubles some at George Mason, who say the public deserves more information about who may be exerting influence on a public university’s leadership and its faculty members. Pienta, the lawyer working with UnKoch My Campus, said “Mason has become basically ground zero for improper donor influence on a public institution.”

“Taxpayers, students, Virginia citizens, we have a right to know who is donating to a public law school and asking the law school in return to serve their interest,” said Pienta, a graduate of George Mason’s law school.

Virginia code, however, exempts from disclosure any records that could reveal the identity of a donor who has requested anonymity. (The state’s Supreme Court ruled last week that George Mason’s fund-raising arm is exempt from public-records laws).

It is still not clear what Seid’s involvement in renaming the law school may have been, if anything. But when the school unveiled a 4,300-pound “Bill of Rights Eagle” statue in front of its building, Butler wanted Seid to know about it.

“Yesterday was a really cool day at Scalia Law,” he wrote to Seid in May 2017, just over a year after the school was renamed. The sculptor had another project in the works, Butler explained: “a larger-than-life statue of Justice Scalia.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.

Nell Gluckman is a senior reporter who writes about research, ethics, funding issues, affirmative action, and other higher-education topics. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.

Dan Bauman and Megan Zahneis contributed to this report.