Buying the Future

The graduation season focuses attention on the perils of universities these days.  Some worry that too many students are on drugs.  Now there's reason for everyone to worry that too many universities are on Koch.

Two Florida newspapers charged that the Florida State University economics department  "had accepted a $1.5 million grant from a foundation controlled by petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch on the condition that Koch’s operatives would have a free hand in selecting professors and approving publications."

NPR's All Things Considered picked up the story, and quoted officials as denying that Koch has a role in selecting faculty, but even in a short and shallow report, otherwise shows how the department bends over for the Koch agenda.

Think Progress, however, notes that Koch has been busy buying the educational future:. As reporter Kris Hundley notes, Koch virtually owns much of George Mason University, another public university, through grants and direct control over think tanks within the school. For instance, Koch controls the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, an institute that set much of the Bush administration’s environmental deregulation policy. And similar conditional agreements have been made with schools like Clemson and West Virginia University. ThinkProgress has analyzed data from the Charles Koch Foundation, and found that this trend is actually much larger than previous known. Many of the Koch university grants finance far right, pro-polluter professors, and dictate that students read Charles Koch’s book as part of their academic study."

Think Progress implicates Brown University, West Virginia University, Utah State and Troy University as well.

Starving government so it no longer has the resources to act in the public interest is the not so secret agenda of the GOPer coalition of the predatory capitalist right and the religious right--a coalition that's become so intertwined that a lot of folks personify both and may even believe they are the same thing. We're seeing this in many areas, and now it's becoming noteworthy in higher education--the last area of education in which the U.S. still holds world prominence, though admittedly more for a few elite institutions than the general makeup.  When you starve these institutions, interested above all in self-preservation, then support has to come from somewhere.  Increasingly, it's coming from billionaires with either or both motives for that agenda, which are linked not only by the profit motive but by opportunities to create a political climate favorable to that agenda.

All of this complements other efforts, from state governments and municipalities mandating what can and cannot be taught in schools regarding (for example) evolution and climate change, to the somewhat buffoonish but still troublesome efforts of people like Michelle Bachman and Mike Huckabee to rewrite history so it comports with Rabid Right ideology.

It's not that universities have heretofor been pure.  The Pentagon and military contractors have financed entire schools for years.  This is just more clearly ideological and political, and aimed at controlling what is taught and what is not.  Except for certain schools sponsored by Christian organizations, colleges and universities have officially and for the most part functionally upheld universal standards against impositions and dictates from outside.   

In the years directly after the Nazis and Fascists, and while the Soviet Union was being heavily critiqued, much was made in the U.S. about the difference between education and propaganda.  A lot of it turns out to be self-serving, but we did get a sense of the difference.  The counter-factual was propaganda, and all you had to do was prove it wrong and it could not masquerade as education.  Conversely, if something is called propaganda and it turns out to be true, it's education.  In today's world, it doesn't necessarily work that way anymore.