unkoch my campus
belated?
SEE DIVEST
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RUBBER GLUE BS ATTACK: [### Unclear Funding for UnKoch: Masking Funders Through ...
Capital Research Center
https://capitalresearch.org › article › unclear-funding-pa...](https://capitalresearch.org/article/unclear-funding-part-2/)
Jun 6, 2018 — The Ford Foundation alone gives ten times what the Koch Foundation does in a year to higher education. Yet the Left is not urging universities ...Read more
Unclear Funding for UnKoch (Full Series)
Campus Activists Create a Boogeyman| Masking Funders Through Essential Information| Live and Let Them Give
[Disclosure: The author participated in the Charles Koch Institute’s Koch Associate Program in 2015-2016, which is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation. The Capital Research Center is a partner in both the Koch Internship and Koch Associate Programs.]
{Summary:UnKoch My Campus prematurely claimed a victory in May when donor agreements between George Mason University and the Charles Koch Foundation revealed the extent to which the foundation controls its university investments through grants. But before UnKoch My Campus throws stones about “dark money,” it needs to come clean about its funding and agenda.*}:
Watch our video about UnKoch’s hypocritical maneuvers to suppress intellectual diversity[
]
Because UnKoch is legally a project of Essential Information and not its own nonprofit, it does not file a distinct tax return (known as a Form 990) with the IRS. Looking at its parent organization doesn’t tell the public much about who is pulling UnKoch’s financial strings. But it offers a few clues.
According to Foundation Search, since 2014, Essential Information has received grants from the Tides Foundation, which is famous for its ability to funnel money from influential donors to radical organizations while protecting the identity of the original giver. CMD has also received gifts from Tides and similar pass-through funding vehicles; when conservative and libertarian donors employ such methods, CMD denounces the contributions as “dark money.”
Tides isn’t the only such entity contributing to Essential Information: The group has received gifts from the Bank of America Charitable Gift Fund as well. In 2015, UnKoch also received a grant from the Solidaire Network, which funds progressive direct-action organizations and has close ties to the liberal donor network Democracy Alliance. Solidaire has a number of giving vehicles to help donors fund new organizations and put infrastructure into fledgling movements.
UnKoch also solicits individual donations on its website. An old “join us” page on the UnKoch Website directs donors to a 404 error page—the defunct URL shows: “https://centerformediaanddemocracy.salsalabs.org/unkochmycampus/index.html.” This suggests that at some point, Center for Media and Democracy was handling at least some of the funds for the UnKoch campaign. At the bottom of this page, UnKoch dubiously mentions:
*Anybody listed on our Staff page as an employee of a partner organization, such as Greenpeace USA or the Center for Media and Democracy, is paid by their respective employer and not by any grants made to UnKoch My Campus.
Your support goes directly to people solely focused on this campaign. Thank you!
Donations in Context
Education is one of America’s favorite philanthropic sectors. Giving to higher education exceeds $40 billion a year. When UnKoch and its Greenpeace, union, and CMD “partners” denounce the influence inherent in charitable giving, they fail to put CKF’s generous $60 million in context with the rest of American higher education gifts. The Ford Foundation alone gives ten times what the Koch Foundation does in a year to higher education. Yet the Left is not urging universities to reject grants from Ford. REALLY?
Perhaps that’s because Ford funds the “right” kind of programs. The Ford Foundation pioneered the first women’s studies programs by giving gifts to colleges and universities. The first wave of grants were successful, but many educators wanted more. Feminists wanted the coursework sprinkled throughout the curriculum. So, in 1989 Ford gave away another $800,000 in grants to universities to “integrate research and teaching on American minority women into undergraduate courses in the liberal arts.”
In light of this obviously ideological philanthropic strategy by one of the largest liberal foundations in existence, on what grounds should Charles Koch, who supports classical liberalism and free markets, be prohibited from funding centers and programs exploring these very ideas? Economics is the most overlooked subject in undergraduate curricula, and programs like the Koch-supported ones at George Mason are poised to reduce the very real crisis in American economic illiteracy.
Likewise, left-wing education groups (like, to choose one at random, the American Federation of Teachers) decry decreases in government education spending, but when the wrong entrepreneur gives back to higher education, they cry foul and instigate protests at the expense of a campus’s academic freedom and intellectual diversity.
:{:{UnKoch maintains that CKF is hostile to academic freedom and what’s worse, that the foundation subscribes to a shadowy theory of social change. (UnKoch may want to update their website, because CKF has a new and better articulated public website describing how the foundation views societal problems—and their solutions.)}:
Of course, the Ford Foundation—which made grants to Essential Information as recently as 2015—alsois interested in strategic giving and creating theories of social change. So does the Solidaire Network. (“Social change” is, frankly, just a buzzword used by philanthropy wonks for ideologically motivated changes to public policy.) Given its penchant for economic study, CKF has a slightly wonkier vision, but it is far from malicious, and is no cause for universities to turn away opportunities to expand their offerings or enhance their campus’s reputation for producing research.}:
*In the conclusion of Unclear Funding for UnKoch, learn why the academy is better off with all points of view represented on college campuses.
Tags: Unclear Funding for UnKoch
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PT1 NO HEADER
Unclear Funding for UnKoch: Campus Activists Create a Boogeyman -Capital Research Center
Usually, few object to philanthropists contributing to support American higher education. But if a university or individual faculty member receives support from the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF), then it suddenly becomes grounds for a conspiracy theory involving so-called “dark money.” All it takes is a small group of Marxist leaders and help from a few left-wing mainstays like Greenpeace, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Leftist interests organized under the “UnKoch My Campus” banner target the Charles Koch Foundation, which is associated with classical liberal philanthropist Charles Koch. The left-wingers claim to see malicious intent from Koch and its “corporate interests” to take over higher education. Most recently, suspicious students with the support of the UnKoch network demanded copies of donor agreements made between CKF and George Mason University (GMU), believing that CKF exerts undue influence at the public university. Scrutiny fell most heavily on the Mercatus Center, an independent, market-oriented economic research center which has a close relationship to GMU’s famed economics department.
The university released expired donor agreements, which GMU President Angel Cabrera claimed “fall short of the standards of academic independence I expect any gift to meet.” The editorial board of the Washington Post went a step further and urged George Mason to release all the gift agreements made between the university and the Charles Koch Foundation, since the expired donor agreements appeared to show the Koch Foundation’s grants gave the foundation a say in hiring or firing decisions at the university. However, the Post was forced to “clarify” that the grants only allowed the foundation a say in hiring or firing positions at the Mercatus Center—which operates independently from the university and does not receive taxpayer funds. As Jim Geraghty noted in National Review, the story of malign influence and threats to academic freedom spun by the far-left groups backing UnKoch fell apart upon close examination.
Many public universities have agreements with donors similar to those between GMU and CKF. Ironically, UnKoch My Campus is unconcerned about the influence of illiberal-left organizations, which easily outspend the Koch Foundation in higher education grants. It seems that UnKoch My Campus only objects to big-dollar donors when those donors fail to meet a certain ideological test—a test predicted by UnKoch’s staff background and organizational partners.
Anti-Capitalist Sentiment and Organizational Allies
This apparent discrepancy makes more sense when one considers that UnKoch My Campus is deeply integrated with organizations on the far left and staffed by radical anti-capitalists. Legally, UnKoch My Campus is a project of Essential Information—a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded by Ralph Nader in 1982. Essential Information’s projects focus on “providing provocative information to the public on important topics neglected by the mass media and policy makers.”
UnKoch My Campus has a small staff. Three of the four staff members co-founded the organization in 2014: Lindsey Berger, Connor Gibson, and Ralph Wilson. The fourth member, Samantha Parsons, founded Transparent GMU—which spearheaded the lawsuit against GMU demanding public release of donor agreements between the university and the Koch Foundation.
The three founders have professional left-wing pedigrees, including internships and jobs with the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the Center for Media and Democracy, which has previously received generous gifts from George Soros’s Foundation to Promote an Open Society. Rather conveniently, Greenpeace and CMD are public partners of UnKoch My Campus alongside the American Federation of Teachers government worker union.
This alliance of leftist organizations is intentional. Ralph Wilson, the apparent prime mover of the UnKoch movement, posted on his Facebook Page in 2014 that Koch made a perfect target to unite the interests of unions, environmentalists, and anti-capitalists.
Earlier in 2012, Wilson addressed Florida State University’s (FSU) Center for Participant Education (CPE), an on-campus organization with a history of far-left activism, with which Wilson was heavily engaged. A
available online shows Wilson giving a “class” denouncing the Koch Brothers—all but forming the future talking points of UnKoch. It’s worth noting that the CPE receives university funding for its activities as a bureau of the FSU student government. That means that taxpayers incubated UnKoch My Campus and paid for this partisan programming and its vacuous “alternative curriculum.”
Wilson makes no secret of his openly Marxist sympathies. While involved with CPE, the organization hosted events on “The Five that Survived—Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, and Democratic Korea,” highlighting the Communist regimes which outlasted the Soviet Union, and a screening of the liberal documentary, Koch Brothers Exposed. Wilson associates with leaders from explicitly Marxist organizations, including the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and participated in Occupy Tallahassee. In a 2014 interview with the socialist publication Liberation, Wilson admits that his Marxist ideology motivated his attacks against the Koch Foundation.
Wilson may have been the architect for UnKoch, but his other two cofounders brought professional activism, organizing, and research to help him build a campaign with national influence.
Co-founder Lindsey Berger spent two years at CMD as a campaign strategist and researcher. In 2016, UnKoch and the CMD jointly released a report criticizing the Koch Foundation’s campaign for criminal justice reform. Lisa Graves, senior fellow and former executive director of CMD, serves on the advisory board of UnKoch.
In addition to cultivating Lindsey Berger, Greenpeace appears to have incubated investigative researcher Connor Gibson. Gibson’s work for Greenpeace, specifically his research into the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the State Policy Network (SPN), and the Koch Foundation, as well as “the surge of requests from college students,” led him to the conclusion that American universities should purge Koch support. However, the relationship between Greenpeace and UnKoch is a bit cozier than it looks. After all, Gibson is paid by Greenpeace to do work that directly feeds into his position with UnKoch. A page on Greenpeace’s website makes it clear that UnKoch became independent from Greenpeace in 2017, leading one to wonder how close the relationship was prior to 2017.
*In the next installment ofUnclear Funding for UnKoch, learn how UnKoch My Campus’s funding lacks the transparency they demand from right-of-center foundations.
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Unclear Funding for UnKoch: Masking Funders Through Essential Information -Capital Research Center
PT 2
... Because UnKoch is legally a project of Essential Information and not its own nonprofit, it does not file a distinct tax return (known as a Form 990) with the IRS. Looking at its parent organization doesn’t tell the public much about who is pulling UnKoch’s financial strings. But it offers a few clues.
According to Foundation Search, since 2014, Essential Information has received grants from the Tides Foundation, which is famous for its ability to funnel money from influential donors to radical organizations while protecting the identity of the original giver. CMD has also received gifts from Tides and similar pass-through funding vehicles; when conservative and libertarian donors employ such methods, CMD denounces the contributions as “dark money.”
Tides isn’t the only such entity contributing to Essential Information: The group has received gifts from the Bank of America Charitable Gift Fund as well. In 2015, UnKoch also received a grant from the Solidaire Network, which funds progressive direct-action organizations and has close ties to the liberal donor network Democracy Alliance. Solidaire has a number of giving vehicles to help donors fund new organizations and put infrastructure into fledgling movements.
UnKoch also solicits individual donations on its website. An old “join us” page on the UnKoch Website directs donors to a 404 error page—the defunct URL shows: “https://centerformediaanddemocracy.salsalabs.org/unkochmycampus/index.html.” This suggests that at some point, Center for Media and Democracy was handling at least some of the funds for the UnKoch campaign. At the bottom of this page, UnKoch dubiously mentions:
*Anybody listed on our Staff page as an employee of a partner organization, such as Greenpeace USA or the Center for Media and Democracy, is paid by their respective employer and not by any grants made to UnKoch My Campus.
Your support goes directly to people solely focused on this campaign. Thank you!
Donations in Context
Education is one of America’s favorite philanthropic sectors. Giving to higher education exceeds $40 billion a year. When UnKoch and its Greenpeace, union, and CMD “partners” denounce the influence inherent in charitable giving, they fail to put CKF’s generous $60 million in context with the rest of American higher education gifts. The Ford Foundation alone gives ten times what the Koch Foundation does in a year to higher education. Yet the Left is not urging universities to reject grants from Ford.
Perhaps that’s because Ford funds the “right” kind of programs. The Ford Foundation pioneered the first women’s studies programs by giving gifts to colleges and universities. The first wave of grants were successful, but many educators wanted more. Feminists wanted the coursework sprinkled throughout the curriculum. So, in 1989 Ford gave away another $800,000 in grants to universities to “integrate research and teaching on American minority women into undergraduate courses in the liberal arts.”
In light of this obviously ideological philanthropic strategy by one of the largest liberal foundations in existence, on what grounds should Charles Koch, who supports classical liberalism and free markets, be prohibited from funding centers and programs exploring these very ideas? Economics is the most overlooked subject in undergraduate curricula, and programs like the Koch-supported ones at George Mason are poised to reduce the very real crisis in American economic illiteracy.
Likewise, left-wing education groups (like, to choose one at random, the American Federation of Teachers) decry decreases in government education spending, but when the wrong entrepreneur gives back to higher education, they cry foul and instigate protests at the expense of a campus’s academic freedom and intellectual diversity.
:{:{UnKoch maintains that CKF is hostile to academic freedom and what’s worse, that the foundation subscribes to a shadowy theory of social change. (UnKoch may want to update their website, because CKF has a new and better articulated public website describing how the foundation views societal problems—and their solutions.) Of course, the Ford Foundation—which made grants to Essential Information as recently as 2015—alsois interested in strategic giving and creating theories of social change. }:
So does the Solidaire Network. (“Social change” is, frankly, just a buzzword used by philanthropy wonks for ideologically motivated changes to public policy.) Given its penchant for economic study, CKF has a slightly wonkier vision, but it is far from malicious, and is no cause for universities to turn away opportunities to expand their offerings or enhance their campus’s reputation for producing research.}:
*In the conclusion of Unclear Funding for UnKoch, learn why the academy is better off with all points of view represented on college campuses.
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PT 3
Unclear Funding for UnKoch: Live and Let Them Give -Capital Research Center
...
If UnKoch My Campus is genuine in its concern for outside influence in public education, then it’s seriously underestimated the scale of the problem. Charles Koch’s money is only a fraction of a percent of all private giving to higher education. The Tides Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and plenty of individual givers have just as much “undue influence” in American universities and it would be impractical and downright feckless to forego funding that expands opportunities for students across the country.
But, of course, the group’s concern probably isn’t genuine. Backed by the furthest fringes of the professional Left, UnKoch exists to silence business and free-market interests, making the group’s accusations that CKF threatens academic freedom risible hypocrisy. The only threat Koch-funded research centers and economic departments pose on campus is to the incumbent left-wing intellectual orthodoxy. In truth, it is the Center for Media and Democracy, Greenpeace, and the American Federation of Teachers (through the UnKoch campaign) who are advocating against open intellectual debate.
Certainly, those running and funding UnKoch have their own agenda, to which they are entitled. The fact that they are affiliated with known illiberal and leftist organizations may be coincidental and secondary to the message they espouse. The lack of transparency around their funding (which Ralph Wilson erroneously described as grassroots and organic) shouldn’t be used to discredit their organization—just as those in conservative and libertarian circles shouldn’t be tarred and feathered over associations or relationships. However, UnKoch is happy to use such fatuous relationships to discredit and cow the Charles Koch Foundation and its grantees.
Until UnKoch and its partner organizations are willing to fully disclose their donors and funding sources, they should instead consider that they benefit from the same rights and protections they accuse the Koch Foundation of exploiting.
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Christine Ravold
Christine is the Capital Research Center’s Communications Officer. She writes, edits, and serves as a press contact. She is a graduate of Rosemont College in Pennsylvania.
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Funding Report — UnKoch My Campus
UnKoch My Campus
http://www.unkochmycampus.org › funding-report](http://www.unkochmycampus.org/funding-report)
Using recently released tax records, we discovered that in 2019, Koch university funding totaled $112,044,071. This is an increase of $23.9 million from 2018.
[### Charles Koch Distributes $82 Million to 140 Colleges and ...
EXPOSEDbyCMD
https://www.exposedbycmd.org › 2022/11/28 › charles-...](https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/11/28/charles-koch-distributes-82-million-to-140-colleges-and-universities/)
Nov 28, 2022 — Billionaire Charles Koch's personal foundation disclosed $81.7 million in grants to 140 colleges and universities in its 2021 IRS filing.
[### Charles Koch Foundation: Social Impact Research Grants
Charles Koch Foundation
https://charleskochfoundation.org](https://charleskochfoundation.org/)
The Charles Koch Foundation works to ensure all people have the opportunity to live a life of meaning and contribution based on their unique gifts and ...
[### Koch Injected Nearly $500 Million into Hundreds of ...
EXPOSEDbyCMD
https://www.exposedbycmd.org › 2024/02/23 › koch-inj...](https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2024/02/23/koch-injected-nearly-500-million-into-hundreds-of-colleges-and-universities-between-2018-and-2022/)
Feb 23, 2024 — Nonprofits controlled by Charles Koch funneled $458.7 million to 338 higher education beneficiaries between 2018 and 2022.
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kochademia 100M$
https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/11/23/koch-funding-of-universities-topped-100-million-in-2019/
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https://www.thenation.com/article/how-charles-koch-is-helping-neo-confederates-teach-college-students/
no many lnx
How Charles Koch Is Helping Neo-Confederates Teach College Students
The Koch Foundation is often praised for its higher-ed funding, but the money is going to some radical professors
By Alex Kotch MARCH 21, 2018
Billionaire industrialist and conservative political mega-donor Charles Koch first entered the political world through the John Birch Society, a secretive anti-Communist outfit that campaigned against the civil-rights movement. Since then, he and his brother David amassed enormous wealth and put together a powerful conservative political network that rivals either major party in size and funding.
A new report from activist group UnKoch My Campus shows that Charles Koch’s ties to white supremacy have persisted throughout his adult life. The report details an array of instances where Koch has funded neo-Confederate scholars—a largely unnoticed aspect of the Koch Industries CEO’s ambitious project of funding higher education.Most alarming is a collaboration between Florida Atlantic University, the Charles Koch Foundation, and a major private-prison company, which is led by a professor who was a member of the research arm of a white-nationalist hate group.
While raking in corporate profits as the head of the family’s oil-refining business since the mid-1960s, Charles Koch and his top tactician, Richard Fink, developed a “Structure of Social Change,” which they would deploy to pull America as far to the right on taxes and regulations as they could. Koch, a libertarian, had resigned from the John Birch Society after opposing its position on the Vietnam War, and created a regressive sphere of influence. The first step in this strategy was funding higher education, because, as he said at a 1974 gathering of the Institute for Humane Studies, now a George Mason University center that he finances and directs, “educational programs are superior to political action, and support of talented free-market scholars is preferable to mass advertising.”
Koch and his family foundations have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges and universities around the United States. In 2013, the Charles Koch Foundation began donating to Florida Atlantic University, offering $5,000 that year. By 2016, the annual donation had risen to $32,000.
Marshall DeRosa, who runs a prison-education program with financial backing from the Koch Foundation, is a Florida Atlantic University political-science professor who has written extensively on the Confederacy. He also has ties to its modern remnants.
From 2000 until at least 2009, according to archived web pages, DeRosa was a “faculty member” at the League of the South Institute, the “educational arm of the Southern independence movement” where “the South’s finest unreconstructed scholars” taught summer institutes and seminars. The LOS Institute acts as the charitable nonprofit of the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a neo-Confederate hate group, and supports a second Southern secession in order to form a nation ruled by “Anglo-Celtic” people.
The LOS was co-founded in 1994 by an original member of the Center for Libertarian Studies, which was launched in 1976 with seed money from Charles Koch. Michael Tubbs, a white nationalist who once stockpiled military weapons and planned to target businesses owned by African Americans and Jews, is still the current chairman of the Florida LOS chapter, according to Newsweek, and has appeared at the side of LOS president Michael Hill as recently as January 2018. In 1987, Hill and three accomplices called themselves “guardians of the gene pool.”
The League of the South Institute is “the educational branch of the Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation,” named after the wife of the late Jack Kershaw, longtime leader within the violent White Citizens Council and founding board member of the League of the South. In 1998, Kershaw erected a statue of Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest and declared, “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?”
Recently, LOS was a prominent white-nationalist force at the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hill, a board member of the Kershey Foundation, had told supporters to prepare for violence. Another LOS member was charged in January for brutally beating a 20-year-old black man at the rally.
Regarding his LOS affiliation, DeRosa told The Nation, “That was a long time ago. I disengaged early on. They’d invite me to things and I’d go to talk about my scholarship, especially the Confederate constitution, but I got an inkling as to some of the characters involved…. I didn’t feel comfortable.”
Experts on hate groups have a different view. “The LOS was different when DeRosa was involved, not as militant, but it still had very, very bad racial views,” said Heidi Beirich, an expert on right-wing extremism and director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “He can’t scurry away from the fact that for a long time he was a member of a group that had white-supremacist view
DeRosa isn’t the only former LOS Institute academic in the Koch higher-ed network. The founder of the institute, Donald Livingston, who served on the Institute for Humane Studies Academic Review Committee—which grants Koch’s “Humane Studies Fellowships” (originally “Claude R. Lambe Fellowships”)—from 1996 to 1999, has stayed in the network’s orbit. Last spring, he lectured at an Institute for Humane Studies seminar at George Mason University.
Thomas DiLorenzo, an “affiliated scholar” of the LOS Institute as recently as 2008, was an economics professor in George Mason University and worked on policy for the Koch-funded, libertarian Cato Institute. In 2005, several years after the Southern Poverty Law Center classified LOS as a hate group, he defended the organization, writing that it “advocates peace and prosperity in the tradition of a George Washington or a Thomas Jefferson.”
DeRosa and DiLorenzo taught a three-day LOS “summer school” together in 2000 on topics including “Why secession was, and is, constitutional” and “How the ‘Fourteenth Amendment’ was never constitutionally passed by Congress nor ratified by the States.”
Not long after SPLC labeled the LOS a hate group in the early 2000s, Livingston left the LOS Institute and founded its successor, the Abbeville Institute, named after the birthplace of fierce slavery advocate John Calhoun, and is still president. (DiLorenzo is currently affiliated with the Abbeville Institute, as well.) In 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed the Abbeville Institute a place where scholars “nostalgic for the Old South” went to “study the virtues of secession.” The Chronicle reported that Abbeville scholars argued that the Civil War, or “the War of Northern Aggression,” was “not about slavery…and that the antebellum Southern states had every right to secede.”
Beirich said that while Livingston did leave the LOS when it became especially extreme, “he runs his own incredibly neo-Confederate institute…. A question [for the Koch Foundation] is, why are you affiliated with a person like that? His position is not a serious historical position. The South did not just fight for states’ rights—it was about slavery. These are distorted views of history.”
DeRosa remains part of Abbeville as well, and other ex-LOS Institute scholars including DiLorenzo have recently been active with the group.
Several former LOS scholars are also part of the Mises Institute, a think tank formed in 1982 that the Southern Poverty Law Center says has “strong neo-Confederate principles.” Its founder, Lewis Rockwell, argued that the Civil War “transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order.”
At least nine Mises Institutes scholars have worked with LOS, according to the UnKoch report, and Mises employs several Koch-funded academics. Mises scholars collectively received $12.5 million in academic funding from the Charles Koch Foundation between 2005 and 2016.
“Through their support for these faculty, the Koch Foundation is subsidizing and strengthening an already booming wave of violent, alt-right anarcho-capitalists,” said Ralph Wilson, the UnKoch report’s author and the group’s co-founder.
When asked for detailed comment about several aspects of this reporting, the Koch Foundation issued a two-sentence reply to The Nation: “The Charles Koch Foundation’s criminal justice reform work is rooted in the principles of human dignity. We do not tolerate racism in any shape or form.”
THE PRISON-TO-WHITE-SUPREMACY PIPELINE
But Florida Atlantic students aren’t the only minds that DeRosa is being paid to shape. After getting commitments from the Koch Foundation and GEO Group, one of the world’s largest private-prison companies, DeRosa got state certification for a pilot program, the Inmate Civics Education Enhancement Project. He taught the first class at a South Bay, Florida, GEO Group prison in 2015.
“It’s disturbing that people of color might be exposed to neo-Confederate ideas in prison,” said Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “If you’re going to find someone to teach in prisons you’d think you could find someone who wasn’t involved with a neo-Confederate hate group.”
Meanwhile, at least four GEO Group executives have served on the Florida Atlantic University board of trustees. GEO Group had an agreement with FAU to donate $6 million to the university in 2013 in exchange for naming rights over the football stadium, but it was withdrawn because it sparked significant controversy. “GEO is very much committed to recidivism. They have a reentry program. They’re amazing,” said DeRosa.
The Koch Foundation offered a one-time grant for the pilot program, said DeRosa, which was extended twice because of the program’s success. The money funded graduate students to teach alongside DeRosa at the prison. What began as one course became four: civics, economics, ethics, and literature. Now the money has run out, said DeRosa, and he’s planning to apply for more.
The ICEEP purports to be an effort to reduce recidivism, which is common among ex-prisoners. But DeRosa suggested in a spring 2017 James Madison Institute journal that an additional goal may be to convert felons in prison, who are more likely to vote for Democrats, to conservatism and then re-enfranchise them. In the article, he noted that “if conservatives were to rally around a practical reform-minded approach that looked to restore rights to those who have completed civics programming while incarcerated, the results would be to expose thousands of new voters to the very constitutional principles which conservatives hold dear.” The James Madison Institute, which received $226,000 from the Koch Foundation in 2016, is a partner of the ICEEP.
DeRosa denied having any partisan agenda, saying his only point was that conservatives “have it all wrong,” and that once inmates have paid their debt to society, they should have the right to vote. “My objective is to reduce recidivism and get them as leaders in their communities,” he said.
Ex-felons are generally not allowed to vote in Florida, but a judge ruled against aspects of the felon-disenfranchisement law on February 1, making re-enfranchisement more of a possibility. Floridians will vote in November on a proposed constitutional amendment that would overturn the state’s disenfranchisement law.
DeRosa says his first prison class was popular, so he applied for additional Koch Foundation money to teach two classes the following year. As of 2016, there were 36 “graduates” of the program, according to GEO Group PR. That year, Koch grant money to Florida Atlantic University quadrupled.
Wilson, the UnKoch report’s author said Koch’s free-market ideology might fit into DeRosa’s federalist and neo-Confederate views. “Koch and DeRosa both subscribe to a fierce version of anarcho-capitalism that views civil rights, and any other government ‘intervention,’ as an overreach of the state,” he said. “DeRosa is simply more honest than Koch about the roots and implications of these beliefs.”
The reality of the situation is staggering: An academic who worked with a neo-Confederate organization is teaching inmates, including many of color, a curriculum he designed, funded by one of the wealthiest conservative political donors in the country and instituted at the facilities of a notorious, predatory private-prison company that is accused of violating federal anti-slavery laws.
In recent years, the Koch brothers hired a public relations firm to help them improve their lagging image as politically polarizing plutocrats. Koch Industries came out with a new motto, “We are Koch,” and the Koch Foundation made a $25 million donation to the United Negro College Fund. The rebrand included shifting their language around cuts to welfare programs, recasting these ideas as the promotion of “well-being.”
While Charles Koch poses as a virtuous billionaire who wants to help ex-felons and welcome immigrants, Koch is funding neo-Confederate academics. Students—whether in prison or a college classroom—should know who their teachers are, and who’s pulling the strings.
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https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-january-15-2018/
unkoch my campus: ralph wilson (grassroots donor, small grants)
FSU report "mechanism of control"
speaker series picked by kochs not by campus; campus free speech bills; certificate pgm minor; chair agreed to stay on 105K$ (bribe to him personally or to pgm?) 5 student astroturf gps; can fire phd student if do not like diss proposal; NDA
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FSU oct 2018
• Other visitors to steering committee meetings included: a. Dr. Anne Rowe, who briefed us on the report drafted by the Koch Subcommittee. Dr. Rowe will be providing more information to the Faculty Senate during today’s meeting.
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...The Koch network is actively pushing the argument that electric vehicles, which don’t pay a gas tax, are to blame for highway funding shortfalls, despite vast evidence to the contrary. Some states have enacted special EV fees to bolster highway funds, and Senator Barrasso is spearheading an effort to create a new fee at the federal level. This despite a recent report by Consumer Reports which found that the majority of these fees are punitive in that they charge plug-in drivers more than the equivalent that gas-powered cars would generate in gas taxes annually.
Even so, some Koch-funded academics have argued recently against raising gas taxes, while taking shots at electric cars. Writing in the Orange County Register last year, a professor and research fellow from Utah State University’s Koch-funded program claim that “The decline in gas-tax revenue caused by the shift away from internal-combustion engines is stressing the highway trust funds in many states,” adding that some states now “charge special fees for electric-car owners to compensate for the lost revenue.”
Similarly, in a recent op-ed in :{Forbes, Adam Milsap, the associate director of the Koch-funded L. Charles Hilton Jr. Center for the Study of Economic Prosperity and Individual Opportunity at Florida State University, writes that “the gas tax is not the long-term funding answer” for road funds. While Milsap doesn’t promote a fee for EVs, he does portray them as a growing part of the problem. Milsap is, to borrow Mitchell’s phrase, “a perfect illustration” of the Koch-funded higher ed ecosystem.}:
In a 2014 panel on “Leveraging Science and the Universities” at the Koch Freedom Partners donor summit session, Milsap described how Koch-funded programs — like George Mason University's Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies — trained him to cultivate a “new talent pipeline” for all levels of the Koch network. He also described how academics should use all “viable mediums,” including “major Republican blogs, op-eds, and policy briefs” to spread ideas to a broader, more popular audience, as he regularly does on Forbes and in other outlets.
Think Tanks: Translating Free Market Ideas to EV Antagonism
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fsu
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-George-Mason-s/243314
Why George Mason’s Agreements With the Koch Foundation Raised Red Flags
By Nell Gluckman MAY 02, 2018 $$$
Both the university and the foundation say newly released documents from 2003 through 2011 do not reflect how they now go about financial partnerships. But the agreements show why faculty critics were concerned about donors’ influence in hiring decisions.
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https://thinkprogress.org/koch-brothers-influenced-george-mason-university-7ce8bb84b753/
The Koch Foundation had a say in hiring and firing George Mason University professors
“The idea that the Kochs are giving money without anything expected in return always seemed a little absurd."
ADDY BAIRDAPR 30, 2018, 6:54 PM
...The documents were released to a former student, Samantha Parsons, after she filed a Freedom of Information Act request. According to the AP, Parsons has had similar requests denied multiple times. Parsons now works for the activist groupUnKoch My Campus, and she told the AP that the documents from George Mason are similar to agreements the Koch Foundation made with Florida State University.
“The faculty is supposed to have the independence to choose the best-qualified candidate,” she told the wire service.
The Koch Foundation said in a statement that the agreements with George Mason University are “old and inactive” and that newer agreements contain no such provisions....
Charles Koch Foundation had a say in hiring and firing professors at George Mason University, an agreement the university denied for years, according to documents released Monday and detailed in an Associated Press report.
The newly released documents spell out the relationship between George Mason and the conservative megadonors wherein the foundation creates a fund to pay the salary of one or more professors at a free-market think tank at the school, the Mercatus Center. The agreements also create a five-member selection committee to choose the professors, and the foundation gets to name two committee members. They could also appoint members to advisory boards that had firing power should Koch-funded professors fail to live up to standards.
Last week, a judge scrutinized George Mason’s refusal to release any documents. In a note to faculty Friday night, George Mason President Angel Cabrera said the agreements “fall short of the standards of academic independence I expect any gift to meet.”
The documents were released to a former student, Samantha Parsons, after she filed a Freedom of Information Act request. According to the AP, Parsons has had similar requests denied multiple times. Parsons now works for the activist group UnKoch My Campus, and she told the AP that the documents from George Mason are similar to agreements the Koch Foundation made with Florida State University.
“The faculty is supposed to have the independence to choose the best-qualified candidate,” she told the wire service.
The Koch Foundation said in a statement that the agreements with George Mason University are “old and inactive” and that newer agreements contain no such provisions.
Proof That Koch-Backed Professors Are Using Universities To Spread Right-Wing Policies
The revelation about George Mason sticks to the Koch brothers’ clear strategy at universities around the country. In 2016, UnKoch My Campus recorded remarks made by Koch-backed professors and executives at the Association of Private Enterprise Education’s annual meeting in Las Vegas, who said students act as “foot soldiers” for free market ideas.
They also said that university deans would take money from anyone and that and that the slightest mention of the foundation’s legal team keeps schools in line.
That same year, $5 million was earmarked for Koch-backed “economic freedom centers” at Arizona public universities, and George Mason’s move to rename their law school the Antonin Scalia Law School after receiving $30 million from the Charles Koch Foundation and an anonymous donor drew a firestorm of criticism.
Suspicious relationship between the Koch brothers and Utah university raises eyebrows
A Utah State University professor heads both on- and off-campus Koch-funded groups.
More recently, the relationship between the Koch brothers and Utah State University has, as ThinkProgress’ Mark Hand put it at the time, raised eyebrows. A small Koch-backed think tank began publishing the same research as one Utah State institute, prompting critics to question whether the conservative donors were using the school to push their agenda.
The question is most certainly worth asking.
As Del. Marcus Simon, a Fairfax County Democrat who helped lead a petition effort in 2016 to block George Mason University from renaming its law school after Scalia, put it to the AP, “The idea that the Kochs are giving money without anything expected in return always seemed a little absurd.”
#HIGHER EDUCATION, #KOCH BROTHERS, #POLITICS
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