Was Ivanka Trump “canceled” by Wichita State University?
If so, might Koch Industries follow suit, canceling its generous donations to the Kansas university?
And what of Jay S. Golden, the university’s president? Should he be canceled, too?
Such are the furious questions that have been visited of late upon Wichita State, where critics have been angered since Ivanka Trump, a special adviser to President Trump, announced last week that she had been demoted from a prominent role as a virtual commencement speaker at the university’s technology campus. She was a victim, she tweeted, of “cancel culture.”
By Wednesday, the controversy had escalated to the point that the Kansas Board of Regents held an emergency closed meeting on a personnel matter, which is higher-ed-speak for “a college president has really ticked off somebody and might lose his job.” Whatever discussion may have taken place behind closed doors, the regents concluded by posting a statement on the board’s website that focused on communication challenges and made no overt critique of Golden.
The university announced last week that it would not include Ivanka Trump’s pre-recorded speech in Wichita State Tech’s commencement, opting instead to post the video among 30 other congratulatory messages that graduates could view separately. Critics initially charged that giving Trump, the president’s eldest daughter, a platform at commencement was inappropriate at a time of civil unrest, spurred by George Floyd’s death last month while in police custody.
If nothing else, the story proved — against heavy odds — that higher education’s perennial commencement controversies are impervious even to a global pandemic that prompted most college campuses to close this spring and forced them to recognize their new graduates with virtual events.
After fading from the national news cycle, Wichita State’s commencement-gate affair resurfaced this week. That was due in part to a politically intriguing article in The Wichita Eagle, which reported on Wednesday that the Trump snub might threaten future donations from Koch Industries, the multinational corporation led by Charles G. Koch, a billionaire conservative political donor.
As the prospect of Golden’s dismissal spread across social media, his supporters took to Twitter with the hashtag #istandwithgolden. (Golden was not made available for an interview.)
D. Shane Bangerter, the board’s chairman, said in an interview, not long before the meeting, that Golden had his support. “I have seen nothing that he has done in regard to the Ivanka Trump situation that would put his position in jeopardy,” he said.
Bangerter said he had been alerted in advance of the university’s plan to cut Trump’s message from the main ceremony, and he approved of it. “There was a discussion beforehand, yes,” he said. “I felt it was a reasonable thing to do in consideration of the events that were going on throughout the nation, being sensitive to the desires of students, and acting in the best interest of the institution.”
“I don’t see it being a free-speech issue at all,” said Bangerter, who was first appointed to the board, in 2013, by the then governor, Sam Brownback, a Republican. (Bangerter describes himself as politically independent.) “Her recorded statements were played in full.”
Koch Cash
What Bangerter describes as nuance, however, others see as spin. The university’s decision to cut Trump from the commencement program was derided by critics as a clear-cut case of shutting down unpopular or divisive speech.
“To do what he did was reprehensible,” Stephen L. Clark, a former Kansas regent, said of Golden. “He chose one side, and you can’t choose one side when you’re a public, taxpayer-supported institution.”
Clark described himself as “conservative” but said he was concerned that his politics would “taint” what should be a discussion about the First Amendment. “We’ve had to endure, if you will, people on campuses that are espousing opinions that would be atrocious to my thinking,” he said. “But it’s free speech.”
On Saturday, Clark emailed Golden and Sheree Utash, president of Wichita State Tech. “Let me first say, the recent event in Minneapolis was reprehensible,” wrote Clark, referring to the site of Floyd’s death and subsequent protests and looting. “Many are now publicly voicing their support for social justice and change, and it’s their right to peaceably do so. Unquestionably, justice must be served, and I’m confident will.
“However, for myself, and I know many of my contemporaries,” he went on, “the politization of the event and subsequent unrestrained lawlessness is just as, if not more, reprehensible. Your communication somehow failed to mention those issues. The communication we received was purely a political statement, and one a taxpayer-funded, public institution should not be making.”
The prospect that Koch Industries might pull donations from the university may be in part attributable to Clark, who wrote to the regents that donors, including Koch, were “very upset and quite vocal in their decisions to disavow any further support,” according to The Wichita Eagle. (The Chronicle has not independently reviewed the letter, and Clark declined to provide it.)
If he mentioned Koch Industries in the letter, Clark said, he did so to reflect the broad anger among donors, not as a result of any direct conversations with the company.
“I have an inbox full of angry complaints from people, and many of them say they will no longer support the university,” said Clark, who is former chair of the Wichita State University Foundation.
Jessica Koehn, a Koch Industries spokeswoman, said that the company would honor its commitments to the university, the Eagle reported. The company, which has its headquarters in Wichita, does “not make our support conditional on employment decisions, which are the sole purview of university officials,” Koehn said. “At the same time, we object to speaker disinvitations. Universities offer students opportunities to encounter new ideas and think for themselves. Limiting access to unpopular speakers, viewpoints, and scholarship doesn’t protect students; it cuts off the chance to engage, debate, and criticize.”
Koch and his late brother, David H. Koch, have steered enormous sums into higher education, raising suspicion that the true mission of the money is to promote a libertarian ideology.
The fear that a university, by slighting the Trump family or canceling a speech, might jeopardize that largess is precisely what critics worry about when it comes to Koch cash.
“To me the biggest issue this raises is that, as states pull funding for public universities and continue to reduce the budgets more and more, we become more and more dependent on our donors,” said Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn, chairman of the Wichita State Faculty Senate. “And that means if you’ve got a donor -- conservative or liberal -- who is willing to invest in the university, you always feel a sense of hesitation about the decisions you can make.”
“If the public really want universities to have true autonomy in their research, their creative activity, and their teaching,” he continued, “there’s got to be a wider support for more public funding of institutions.”
