Florida State Univ

see koch-ademia

no merri

this node is for all Fl univs

see gulf state

SEE NEW COLLEGE TAKEOVER RUFO

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CDR Enterprises donated $1 million in December 2023 to Fight Right Inc., a super PAC that supported DeSantis’ presidential campaign. Late last year, DeSantis announced he was appointing Duart to the board of trustees at Florida International University, and named his wife, Tina Vidal-Duart, to the Florida Atlantic University Board of Trustees.

Florida Atlantic University (Florida Atlantic or FAU) is a public research university with its main campus in Boca Raton, Florida, United States. The university is a member of the State University System of Florida and has satellite campuses in Dania Beach, Davie, Fort Lauderdale, Jupiter, and Fort Pierce.^[3][6] FAU was established as Florida's fifth public university and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity".^[7]

FAU has quickly grown to become one of the largest institutions in the state by enrollment.^[8] Florida Atlantic offers more than 180 undergraduate and graduate degree programs within its 10 colleges.^[9] The university is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).

wiki

Florida International University (FIU) is a public research university with its main campus in Westchester, Florida, United States. Founded in 1965 by the Florida Legislature, the school opened to students in 1972. FIU is the third-largest university in Florida and the eighth-largest public university in the United States by enrollment.^[10][11] It is a constituent part of the State University System of Florida and one of four state-designated Preeminent State Research Universities.^[12]

FIU is classified as a Carnegie "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" institution.^[13] It has 11 colleges and more than 40 centers, facilities, labs, and institutes that offer more than 200 programs of study.^[14] It has an annual budget of over $1.7 billion and an annual economic impact of over $5 billion.^[15] The university is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).

...Florida International University (FIU) is a public research university with its main campus in Westchester, Florida, United States. Founded in 1965 by the Florida Legislature, the school opened to students in 1972. FIU is the third-largest university in Florida and the eighth-largest public university in the United States by enrollment.^[10][11] It is a constituent part of the State University System of Florida and one of four state-designated Preeminent State Research Universities.^[12]

GAI DUDES SEAMUS BRUNER, MCFATTER?

# Jacob McLeod

Florida State University

Tallahassee, Florida, United States

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REUTERS 11 25

...

At least 19 lawsuits have been filed against employers who punished Kirk critics, state and federal court records show. At least two plaintiffs have succeeded, including an academic in South Dakota who got his teaching job back.

Karen Leader, an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University, took to social media after Kirk’s death to protest a narrative that he “was a shining inspiration to youth and a noncontroversial figure who just wanted to have open and civil dialogue,” she said. “Anyone who’s in higher education knows that it’s not that simple.”

She noted that Turning Point rose to prominence through its Professor Watchlist, a site that encouraged students to report faculty for allegedly holding “radical left” views or being a “terror supporter.”

Kirk had described the Watchlist as an awareness tool, not a blacklist. Those on it have said in interviews, social media posts and public forums that it fostered harassment and intimidation. In 2023, a Turning Point reporter was accused of assaulting an Arizona professor who was on the watchlist after confronting him on camera about his sexuality and shoving him to the ground. The reporter admitted to harassment, assault and disorderly conduct and was ordered to complete a diversion program. A Turning Point cameraman admitted to harassment in the case.

Karen Leader, an associate professor of art history at Florida Atlantic University, was placed on administrative leave after she posted about Kirk on social media. REUTERS/Marco Bello

On September 10, Leader began posting Kirk’s past statements on X. She said she made a mistake by incorrectly accusing Kirk of having uttered an ethnic slur and then deleted it. The rest of her posts she said she stands behind, including one highlighting Kirk’s claim that Black Americans were “better” during Jim Crow.

“None of it was me encouraging violence,” Leader said. “I was sharing evidence.”

Jordan Chamberlain, a former staffer of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, shared screenshots of several of Leader’s posts and tagged her university, asking if it approved of the content. Libs of TikTok shared Leader’s faculty headshot. The university’s president announced she had been put on administrative leave. Her address and phone number appeared online, and menacing messages followed.

A voicemail left in September for associate professor Karen Leader after she posted online about Kirk

In one voicemail reviewed by Reuters, the caller said: “We’re coming to get you. Karen Leader, we know where you work. We’re gonna come to your home as soon as we have your location.” Leader said she has rarely left her apartment since.

She reported the threats to Boca Raton police, which referred the case to campus officers, according to a police report. Florida Atlantic University police said their report could not be released because of an active criminal investigation.

Florida Atlantic University confirmed Leader was one of three academics who were on leave pending investigations. It declined further comment. Chamberlain also didn’t return an email seeking comment.

“Whether my career is over or not, I don’t know,” Leader said. “But my life has changed.”

The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here.

Additional reporting by Phil Stewart, Jana Winter, and Courtney Rozen in Washington and Isaac Vargas in Los Angeles. Edited by Jason Szep and Linda So.

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an sn 7 25

If you’re wondering what happens when history is bowdlerized or suppressed, lies are enshrined, free enquiry stifled, empathy ridiculed, education crippled, and hatred valorized, take a look at Preston Damsky, racist, antisemite, and top law student at the University of Florida.

Damsky’s now notorious for receiving a “book award” as the best student in his “Originalism” seminar. Seems the professors were dazzled by his capstone essay arguing the Constitution’s “We the People” means white people.

Only white people.

Non-whites should have their voting rights protections removed. What he calls “criminal infiltrators at the border” should be shot on sight.

Amendments 13, 14, and 15, the ones abolishing slavery and enshrining citizenship, equal treatment under the law, and the right to vote are illegitimate.

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According to Damsky, “The United States was founded as a race-based nation-state for the preservation and betterment of White Americans(the People), as clearly laid out in the Preamble and revealed by our history, it is difficult to see how these amendments (or at least the way they have been interpreted in the post-World War II era) do not amount to unconstitutional, revolutionary usurpations by the constituted government power.”

There’s a touch of truth in this: The 18th Century iteration of our Constitution was indeed written by white men for white men.

But much as he’d love for American society to look like it did in 1788, when the Federalist Papers were published, times have changed. We fought a bitter war over slavery, marched against segregation, demanded rights for the disenfranchised, and eventually legislated our way — slowly and partially — to a more equitable nation.

The post-Civil War amendments are just as valid, just as much a part of the Constitution of the United States, as the earlier ones.

For now, at least: it’s unclear whether this will continue to be the case.

At home in Florida

Most Americans once celebrated our heterogeneity, our pluralism, and our tendency to expand freedoms. We valued knowledge and tried to foster understanding; we welcomed the new.

Not so much these days, not here in Florida. Trump and DeSantis have made ignorance great again.

This state now has statutes forbidding teaching the truth about slavery and Jim Crow, threatening educators who discuss gender, sexuality, systemic racism, and other disfavored topics.

Universities are scrubbing their websites of words that might upset the governor and his goons: “women,” “Black,” “colonialism,” and “diversity” — even if it’s “biodiversity” — anything seen as threatening to white, male Christian hegemony.

No wonder Preston Damsky, who was raised in the alarmingly multicultural world of Southern California, feels at home in here in Florida.

Florida is also alarmingly multicultural, of course, but our governor — while not an avowed white supremacist — is nonetheless an anti-immigrant, anti-civil rights, Viktor Orban-wannabe whose definition of “American” leaves out an awful lot of people.

DeSantis’ Florida is big on book bans, removing from schools books with LGBTQ characters, books about civil rights, books questioning American exceptionalism, books that tell painful truths about the world.

Toni Morrison’s “Bluest Eye,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice,” Khaled Hosseini’s “Kite Runner,” Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” Judy Blume’s “Forever,” and Anne Frank’s “Diary” have all been challenged or deep-sixed by parents and school boards who want to suppress stories that might deepen and complicate students’ knowledge of the country they live in or expand their understanding of ways to be human.

In Escambia County, they’ve yanked the dictionary off the shelf.

Seems Merriam-Webster might harbor smut and subversion.

‘Institutional neutrality’

But nobody’s censoring Preston Damsky’s weird, warped take on who counts as a real American, and nobody is punishing him for being a white supremacist.

When asked why Damsky’s paper was not only acceptable but worthy of an award, the interim dean of UF’s law school cited “institutional neutrality” and said professors must not practice “viewpoint discrimination.”

This is actually as it should be: Contrary to right-wing talking points accusing the academy of “canceling” the insufficiently “woke,” universities are places where you can express unpopular, even vile, racist, exceptionally stupid opinions.

But “institutional neutrality” doesn’t seem to apply to all exceptionally stupid opinions — as Preston Damsky has now discovered.

Virulent racism is OK: The Trump regime is not yanking funding from universities for anti-Black discrimination.

Antisemitism, however, unleashes a firestorm.

The Trump-DeSantis axis has ginned up such hysteria over perceived antisemitism (which the rational among us can see is often principled support for the Palestinian people and horror at the murderous Netanyahu government), that anyone who criticizes Israel is treated like Heinrich Himmler, architect of the “Final Solution.”

Mohsen Madawi, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil and other student protesters detained for exercising their First Amendment rights are not Nazis. Preston Damsky, on the other hand … well, he has said calling him a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong.”

His social media posts call Jews “parasites” and declare they must be “abolished by any means necessary.”

In a neat triangulation of white nationalism, antisemitic paranoia, and (somewhat understandable) disdain for the whole U.S. government, one of Damsky’s X posts castigates Donald Trumpfor inviting rapper (and Florida native) Kodak Black to the White House.

This, Damsky said, serves to “normalize and glorify the mongrelized stupidity that is modern Jewish-produced ‘popular’ ‘culture.’”

‘Warrior culture’

You’d think the guy would notice Trump is not exactly devoid of his own antisemitism, accusing Jews of being money-grubbing and “disloyal” to America. In Iowa the other day, he invoked one of the oldest and nastiest Jewish stereotypes, calling bankers “shylocks.”

And surely Damsky would give the Trumpists credit for their own racist projects, restoring Confederate names to military facilities and starting the process to take Harriet Tubman’s nameoff a Navy ship.

Defense Secretary “Good Hair” Hegseth bleats about restoring a “warrior culture” to the military, obviously unaware that Harriet Tubman spied for the Union Army and led the 1863 Combahee Ferry Raid into Confederate territory.

Look it up, Pete. She was a warrior.

UF hasn’t expelled Damsky, but the university has made clear he’s not welcome on campus. If he trespasses, he could be charged with a second-degree misdemeanor.

It’s not the racism, it’s the antisemitism.

While Damsky shares many of the sentiments of Trump’s team of white nationalists, especially Stephen Miller, who wants to deport anybody with brown skin, Damsky despises Trump for being a tool of our old friend, the International Jewish Conspiracy.

Damsky’s X account is a crazy salad of the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend pro-Iranian screeds, demands for a Palestinian state (has he noticed that Persians and Arabs are not, according to his definition, white?), attacks on conservatives deemed insufficiently pro-Caucasian, and ranting about “Black criminality.”

He’s a Florida man, all right — an antebellum Florida man.

‘Illegitimate revolution’

His law school papers echo Confederate Ordinances of Secession: “The negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

At times he sounds like South Carolina’s Jim Crow Sen. Ben Tillman, who thundered in 1900 that Black people had no rights: “We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will.”

Census projections show the U.S. will be a majority minoritynation in about 2045. Appalled at the thought, Damsky calls this “an illegitimate revolution” and says white folks “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”

The 14th and 15th Amendments must be repealed; non-whites, who cannot be citizens, should be given 10 years to leave the country; political violence on behalf of white hegemony is not only acceptable, it’s desirable.

Preston Damsky is not a cause, he’s a symptom, yet another white man terrified of losing the power he assumes is his God-given right.

He and the white nationalist Trump regime are unable to accept that the indigenous peoples our European ancestors displaced, killed, or locked up on reservations; the Africans kidnapped and forced into slavery to enrich the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scottdecision (and apparently one of Damsky’s heroes); and the immigrants from all over the world who risked everything to get here, are what make America great.

These scared people should get out more — and read more, say, W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Black Reconstruction” or Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” or Percival Everett’s “James” or Marie Arana’s “Latinoland.”

Education is the enemy of hatred.

Most of the time.

Nevertheless, those of us who teach must keep trying to blast the Preston Damskys out of their sad, cramped little worlds by showing them the many and wonderful ways to be an American.

Damsky’s probably enjoying all this attention. That’s fine. He will no doubt go on to become an intellectual star in the white supremacist world.

He may even get an invitation to dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

But he won’t get what he wants. America never was, and never will be, a “white man’s country.”

And thank God for that.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

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an sn 6 25

A few days ago, the University of Florida was all ready to welcome a brand-new president. They’d gotten rid of the useless (yet expensive) Ben Sasse and chosen a single finalist, a scientist called Santa Ono, former head of the University of Michigan.

The trustees liked him; Ron DeSantis liked him, especially since Ono, who was once all-in on diversity at UM, recently pulled a 180, loudly recanting his climate change-admitting, student protest-allowing progressive ways and parroting the governor’s War on Woke nonsense like a DeSantis Bot.

It wasn’t enough: The state university Board of Governors refused to give him the job.

Poor old weathervane Ono fell victim to a nasty social media campaignagainst him, led by such intellectual giants as Don Trump Jr., who squawked “WTF!” on the twixter; New College trustee Christopher “They’re eating the cats!” Rufo; Sen. Rick Scott; and the congenitally absurd Rep. Byron Donalds, who allowed as how while he didn’t know Ono, the man didn’t sound like he “comported with the values of the state of Florida.”

Au contraire, congressman. Given that Ono was prepared to abandon the principles of free speech, inclusion, and academic independence, I’d say he perfectly comports with the values of the state of Florida.

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Especially when it comes to higher education.

DeSantis and his UF allies may have lost the Ono battle (more on the politics involved later), but he’s committed to the larger war: Florida may soon be celebrated in the MAGA-sphere as the first state to lay waste to its universities.

New College purge

The full-scale assault started in 2023, when DeSantis wrecked New College and took to installing ideologically aligned hacks as presidents and appointing university boards so bent on destruction they’d shame a Visigoth.

Former politico Richard Corcoran was not educationally, temperamentally, or administratively qualified to be president of the state honors college, yet there he is, DeSantis’ boy, drawing a huge salary and inviting accused rapiststo speak on campus in Sarasota.

FIU and FAU got landed with dead-enders former Lt. Gov. Jeannette Nuñez and Republican state Rep.-turned private prison company vice president Adam Hasner.

Now the governor has turned his lizardy eye upon the universities of West Florida and Florida A&M with a view to undermining academic freedom, student opportunity, and scholarly rigor.

DeSantis, who loves to call Florida “free,” doesn’t want institutions of higher education to be free: He wants them cowed, cramped, and compliant.

In April, DeSantis claimed — with no evidence, mind — UWF was some kind of “indoctrination camp” run by “Marxist professors” and warned those crazy Pensacola lefties to “buckle up.” Big changes were coming.

To that end, he appointed a noisome bouquet of trustees, several proudly hostile to book-learning. Three of them were either rejected by the Florida Senate or else slunk off before they could be officially sent packing.

Adam Kissel, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and one of the discarded candidates, seemed puzzled by the snub. In an interview with UWF’s newspaper “The Voyager,” he claimed he’d been brought down by a “disinformation narrative” partially based on his comments lamenting the GI Bill’s negative effect on American society.

That would be the GI Bill that has enabled millions of veterans to get a college degree and join the middle class.

‘Cancel culture’

Kissel also complained about the general milieu in blood red Escambia County, claiming, “Cancel culture is still alive in Pensacola.”

After these embarrassing rebuffs, you might think DeSantis might rethink his approach but, of course, you’d be wrong. His newest trustee pick, another Heritage Foundation luminary, pitched a hissy fit about UWF students putting on a Halloween drag show in 2019.

(Halloween — you know, when people dress up in all sorts of outlandish ways?)

Zack Smith, a Pensacola native and former assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Florida, told UWF’s then-president Martha Saunders he had “concerns” (most of which seem to involve gay people asserting equal rights or Black people calling out systemic racism in America), including such outré actions as inviting one of the founders of Black Lives Matter to speak on campus (she’s an “avowed Marxist”!) as well as the UWF librarian suggesting Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” as a good read for Black History Month.

God forbid students might encounter a critique of capitalism or an important and provocative exploration of race during Black History Month.

Pro tips for Project 2025 zealots:

Capitalism is not beyond criticism. I refer Heritage True Believers to Mark 10:25 (the camel/rich man/eye-of-needle thing) and Matthew 6:24 (the God and Mammon thing) as well as analyses of our economic system, many written by those embedded in it.
Marxism is a political philosophy. Like any other philosophy, it should be studied in universities. Merely hearing about it does not rot your very soul.
Ibram X. Kendi is a distinguished scholar, a graduate of Florida A&M University who has gone on to win a National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. Reading his work will not infect you with the Woke Mind Virus.

But — agree or disagree with what Kendi says — his book might make you think.

Imagine that: college students thinking.

Obeisance

Eye-wateringly stupid as Smith’s complaints were, they had the intended effect: Martha Saunders resigned, allowing DeSantis to put his education commissionerin as interim president.

The irredeemably unimpressive Manny Diaz Jr. has no higher ed experience, no terminal degree, and no business running what was, under presidents such as Judy Bense, a highly regarded archeologist, and Martha Saunders, an expert in communications theory, a university on its way up.

Unfortunately for UWF, odds are Diaz gets the permanent gig: That’s what happened at New College; that’s what happened at FIU.

DeSantis wants university presidents who realize they do not work for the institution, fostering knowledge, encouraging free inquiry, and serving education.

He insists they work for him. They must do his bidding, battling villains such as faculty unions, student journalists, Pride Month celebrations, critical race theory, gender studies, and African American studies.

Which brings us to FAMU.

DeSantis and his higher ed henchpersons have, in the past, tread pretty carefully with Florida’s only public HCBU.

Maybe it’s because FAMU is such a, well, let’s call it a “bargain.”

In 2024-25, FAMU’s enrollment was 9,980. New College’s was 850. FAMU’s appropriation was $50 million. New College got $52 million.

Even those of us who went to school in Florida can do that math.

Not that anyone should be surprised the state spends far more per student at predominantly white New College than at predominantly not-white FAMU.

Can’t be racism. Oh, no. Perish the thought.

Even though on Planet DeSantis, the very existence of a majority-minority student body is DEI gone wild.

At any rate, FAMU’s no longer flying under the governor’s radar. He just got to stick another of his favorites in the top job.

The good part: FAMU’s presidential search was unusually transparent, at least in comparison to the absurdly hermetic process at UF and other state institutions. The four finalists’ names were publicly announced and students, faculty, and community members were invited to meet them.

Three had solid-to-excellent qualifications. Contenders included the provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, the senior vice president for administration and finance at the University of Central Florida, and FAMU’s own senior vice president and COO.

The not-so-good part: Candidate Number Four.

Marva Johnson appeared almost out of nowhere, rumored to be a late addition pushed by trustee Deveron Gibbons, a DeSantis appointee.

As you’d expect, she has no higher education experience, but she has far more important qualities: She’s a telecom company executive, a MAGA Republican, and a crony of Ron DeSantis’.

Disquiet at FAMU

FAMU has long been a leader in the fight for civil rights and remains the nation’s top public HCBU, alma mater of politicians like former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and U.S. Rep. Al Green, musicians Common and Cannonball Adderley, satirist Roy Wood Jr., Wimbledon champion Althea Gibson, and art collector Bernard Kinsey.

Rattlers were horrified Johnson made the short list and held rallies protesting her candidacy. Movie producer, FAMU alum and big-time donor Will Packer said she might “do irreparable harm to the university’s relationship with its community and with its donor base.”

Naturally, she got the job.

And, like any self-respecting MAGA grifter, immediately demanded a salary of $750,000, nearly $300,000 a year higher than her predecessor.

Of course, she won’t make as much as the president of New College: He pulls in nearly a $1 million overseeing those 850 students.

Taxpayers might wonder why, when legislators and the governor keep whining about the need to cut budgets and save money, there seems to be no problem paying a gaggle of under-qualified nonentities huge amounts to be university presidents.

But universities in Florida and other MAGA-controlled states are no longer so much about education as they are about propaganda and power.

Republicans want to control curriculum, censoring anything that upsets white folks — topics such as slavery, genocide, colonialism, gender, women’s rights.

You’ve seen how Trump is going after Harvard and other universities, cutting off funding, trying to control hiring and admissions, denying foreign students visas.

Colleges in Utah, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and (no surprise) Florida are being told to emphasize Western Civilization, the Constitution, and “Great Books.”

Ono’s crash and burn

MAGAs might not like it if universities really focused on, say, the Constitution. Students might realize that the current regime regularly violates it.

For Ron DeSantis, taming Florida’s universities feeds his desperate need for relevance. Spurned by the voters during his disastrous presidential bid, ridiculed by onetime patron Donald Trump, defied by the Legislature, DeSantis figures at least he can run — or ruin — education.

It’s not quite as smooth a conquest as anticipated.

The crash of Santa Ono’s UF candidacy was about the Right’s fear of DEI. But it was also about giving DeSantis a black eye.

The crash of Santa Ono’s UF candidacy was about the Right’s fear of DEI — they truly do want to Make America White (and Christian and male-dominated) Again — and hysteria over hiring someone who, despite his pathetic attempts to demonstrate that he’d drunk the Trumpy Kool-Aid, clearly knew better.

But it was also about giving DeSantis a black eye.

Signs indicate Casey DeSantis will run for governor when her husband terms out.

But she’s got all kinds of political problems, not least an investigation into her dodgy charity, Hope Florida.

Her husband is spewing spittle all over Tallahassee, accusing a “jackass” in the Legislature (the rest of us know him as Rep. Alex Andrade) of taking documents which “he dropped in a prosecutor’s office,” and hollering “that is not an organic investigation” and any accusation of money laundering is just a “smear.”

Then there’s her likely primary opponent, Rep. Byron Donalds. He’s been endorsed by Trump.

It’s no coincidence he led the MAGA campaign against Ono.

Higher education has always been political. Governors and legislators have never approved of professors (liberals, mostly) or students (snotty-nosed kids protesting) or faculty (probably Marxists).

But DeSantis has taken the politicization of universities to a whole new level of venality, pettiness, and dangerous repression.

The “Free State of Florida” isn’t.

As that famous novel(which could soon be on the banned books list) says: “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength.”

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AN 6 25

In May, University of Michigan President Santa Ono resigned from that position in order to pursue the same position at the University of Florida. But thanks to Florida's far-right political climate, Ono ended up not getting the job.

During his years at the University of Michigan — where he became president in 2022 — Ono supported diversity initiatives, according to Slate reporter Alex Kirshner. And that came back to haunt him in a big way.

Despite what Slate describes an effort to give himself a "face plant" and downplay the University of Michigan policies he embraced, Slate emphasizes, Ono encountered fierce opposition from MAGA Republicans in the Sunshine State.

Slate's Alex Kirshner, in an article published on June 4, explains, "Consistent with his mission to make Florida the kind of place where 'woke goes to die,' Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies had been steadily building up power in Florida's higher-education system. The state's public universities, not just UF in Gainesville, were turning over their presidents at a rapid rate. DeSantis effectively controls the state university system's 'board of governors,' which this past winter, gave itself the power to approve the picks by the campus-level board of trustees."

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Kirshner continues, "It was for this conservative audience that Ono had spent weeks, if not longer, trying to establish himself as a good soldier in the culture war against higher education. And it was this same audience that, on Tuesday, (June 3), denied Ono his next job."

The fact Ono "previously supported diversity initiatives" at the University of Michigan, Kirshner emphasizes, was a deal-breaker in Florida.

"Though Ono had gone to pains to distance himself from his own record on that issue," Kirshner reports, "Republican politicians from around the state pounced on it anyway. Donald Trump Jr. asked whether Florida's bosses had 'lost their minds.' Republican Florida Rep. Byron Donalds called for a new search…. Ono had a long, distinguished resume. It didn't help him, because the people who denied him this latest dream job aren't running universities to teach. They're running them to make a point."

Kirshner adds, "By debasing himself at their feet, Ono helped them do exactly that."

*Read the full Slate article at this link (subscription required).

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an states n? 5 25

Why are right-wingers so scared of ideas?

Are their minds so weak that mere exposure to certain books will infect them with what Elon Musk calls “the woke mind virus”?

They don’t want you inoculated against measles, but they’re doing their damnedest to inoculate Americans against knowledge.

Novels upset them; poetry upsets them; science upsets them; history upsets them; art upsets them; questioning of authority upsets them.

Universities really, really upset them — all that interrogating norms; all that challenging orthodoxy; all that critical inquiry.

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To that end, Donald Trump’s going to war with Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, even Penn, his alma mater.

Ron DeSantis beat him to it: The governor’s been trying for years to regulate speech, impose restrictions on what teachers can teach, and decree which books the state of Florida finds “acceptable.”

While he’s had some success in K-12, enabling Moms for Liberty and their ilk in their book-banning crusade and threatening educators with dire consequences if they mention the existence of gay and trans people, some judges, unsurprisingly partial to the First Amendment, have slapped him down.

DeSantis, nothing if not energetic in his rage, is now determined to shield our precious college students from Dangerous Thoughts.

Choose the administrators. Choose the presidents. Control the universities.

The University of Florida needs a new dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences — with 40 majors and more than 10,000 students, it’s the largest college at UF.

They got as far as interviewing four highly qualified candidates: two mathematicians — UF’s own Kevin P. Knudson and Maggy Tomova, dean of UCF’s College of Science; Ryan Schroeder, dean of Georgia Southern’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences; and Robert Brinkmann, a professor of Geology and dean of Liberal Arts and Science at Northern Illinois University.

‘Radical DEI progressives’

But two weeks ago, the governor blew up the search. Demanded UF stop it.

Seems the finalists, admired scholars and seasoned leaders, are crypto-Marxist, Trump-hating eggheads bent on destroying America.

An anonymous social media account calling itself “Commies on Campus” ran shrieking to Bryan Griffin, DeSantis’ communications director, calling all four “ radical DEI progressives.”

The Commies posted slick, selectively edited videos of candidate interviews, slamming Brinkmann for stating the obvious: “We have people in charge of things in our country that don’t have any business being in charge of those things,” and Knudson for being proud that as head of UF’s Honors Program “we were able to increase the number of African American and Hispanic students in the program.”

As if that’s somehow shameful.

Kent Fuchs, UF’s invertebrate of an interim president, sent out a memo pretending “terminating the search” was the only thing to do, what with the university also in the middle of hiring a permanent president.

Fuchs has never said no to DeSantis.

He does as he’s told, facilitating the hiring of our data-challenged surgeon general at UF’s medical school and trying to stop professorsfrom testifying on voting rights.

Academic freedom doesn’t matter; the professors’ expertise might pose a “conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida.”

As if serving the interests of the executive branch should somehow be the mission of a university.

UF remains a distinguished institution, though slipping in national rankings of public universities. It was No. 5 a couple of years ago but is now No. 7.

Still pretty good, especially given DeSantis’ obsessive attacks on higher education in the state.

But allowing some trifling X account to dictate policy at Florida’s flagship university won’t exactly burnish UF’s reputation.

All-purpose insult

Whoever the “Commies on Campus” may be, they weren’t paying attention in political science class.

They call anything they don’t like “communist:” LGBTQ, feminism, secularism, programs for the poor, addressing the climate crisis, taxing the rich, giving anyone without one of those useful White Man Cards a fair shot in life.

“Communist” is MAGA’s all-purpose insult.

Read a book, kids: While real live commies like the ones in North Korea, Cuba, or China may think religion is the opiate of the masses and rich folks (except the leaders of these countries) shouldn’t exist, they’re not keen on stuff like feminism, they persecute gay people, and they sure as hell don’t favor DEI.

Ask the Uighurs.

Yet DeSantis, a man educated beyond his intelligence, takes what these nameless chuckleheads say at face value.

There are in fact a number of well-regarded Marxist scholars at American universities. Yale, the governor’s alma mater, has a reading group studying Marxism and Cultural Theory.

Nevertheless, DeSantis emerged from the Red Menace of New Haven untainted.

He’s also unimpeded by understanding what universities are supposed to do.

An academic’s job is to research everything from the Roman Republic to astrophysics to Norse sagas to gene structure to the ideology of slavery to economic and political systems, which requires reading across the spectrum from “Das Kapital” to “ The Road to Serfdom“ and presenting their data and knowledge to students.

We call this “education.”

It’s embarrassing how MAGAs deem Hungarian (or Putinist) authoritarianism OK, even admirable, while “communist” is the gravest of insults and socialism is a mortal sin.

Perhaps they’re unaware socialism is viewed favorably by around 36%of Americans.

That’s almost the same number who say they strongly support Donald Trump.

Ideas are not viruses

The point is, ideas are not viruses: Mere exposure to communist thought doesn’t turn you into a communist, any more than reading James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” makes you gay, any more than reading “The Wealth of Nations” ensures you’ll become a rabid capitalist.

But MAGAs don’t do high-level thinking: It makes their heads hurt. They simply react.

Loudly. Ignorantly. Irrationally.

Commies on Campus now has a new project: trying to influence who will become the new president of the University of Florida.

UF has announced a finalist.

One finalist. Chosen in secret.

He is Dr. Santa Ono, a Canadian American immunologist.

The Commies say he’s some kind of woke monster who, as president of the University of Michigan, created “THE LARGEST #DEI EMPIRE in the country.”

Their evidence? Christopher Rufo, the febrile New College trustee last heard claiming immigrants were eating cats and dogs, calls Ono “left-wing” and points to a 2023 commencement address in which he made the unimpeachable statement, “The climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time.”

Florida gubernatorial candidate and Trump acolyte U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, never losing a chance to ingratiate himself with MAGA voters, demands UF “ go back to the drawing board.”

Donalds’ hair is on fire because Ono once said, “Racism is one of America’s original sins.”

Deep breath, people: 1. Both of Ono’s statements are perfectly true; and 2. Rufo, Donalds, and the Commies need to update their intel.

Ono has changed his tune. No longer a champion of diversity, he’s now singing from the DeSantis Hymnal, declaring himself in “total alignment” with the governor’s anti-woke crusade.

“I have the same views as this governor,” Ono said.

Bend the knee

During his three years at Michigan (the shortest tenure of any president in the university’s history), Ono initially won praise for prioritizing sustainability and anti-racist projects. Students say he was personable and accessible.

Then Trump happened, and, like too many university administrators, he bent the knee, shutting UM’s DEI office, cracking down on student protest, and creating, as one faculty member said, “ a surveillance state.”

Seems he deployed plainclothes officers police to trail and photograph people on UM’s campus.

No wonder DeSantis likes this guy.

Santa is a real scholar, a proper scientist, with academic and administrative qualifications that could have been a great fit at UF. He’s streets ahead of DeSantis’ last hand-picked president, the empty, in-over-his-head Ben Sasse, whose one discernable talent was spendingother people’s money.

In a Trump-free world, Ono might have become the leader who could protect the institution. He might have pushed back against the governor’s determination to reduce Florida’s universities to football factories with libraries curated by the likes of Christopher Rufo and courses insisting on the divine greatness of America.

Alas, Ono has made clear that’s not him, not anymore.

This is what you get when one incurious, anti-intellectual, and perpetually angry man chooses university presidents in secret.

This is what you get when there’s only one finalist.

Yes, the trustees officially make the job offer, but there’s no chance they’d hire someone DeSantis didn’t like.

This is the reality of higher ed in Florida today.

FIU has one finalist for president. No shock that it’s DeSantis’ former lieutenant governor and Interim President Jeannette Nuñez.

In its presidential search, FAU announced three finalists. Maybe this would be a real contest?

Two had Ph.Ds. and solid higher ed experience. One was a Republican political hack.

You can guess who got the gig.

A ‘plant’ at FAMU?

Florida A&M, still in the process of choosing a president, has four finalists.

Promising, right?

There were initially three on the shortlist, all with extensive university experience. Then a fourth candidate, a woman with ties to top Republicans, appeared.

She’s Marva Johnson, a communications company executive, appointed by then-Gov. Rick Scott to the Florida Board of Education and chosen by Ron DeSantis for the Florida Scholars Academy Board of Trustees.

Commies on Campus have not yet weighed in on this one.

FAMU alumni say she’d be a terrible choice, calling her “ a plant” and likening her to a Trojan Horse hostile to the university’s mission.

But what the alumni want, and what the university wants, probably won’t matter.

What DeSantis wants matters.

As everyone in the unfree state of Florida knows, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

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new college target rufo?

an 4 25

It’s always been like this: Al Capone wintered in Miami Beach; Richard Nixon escaped to his Key Biscayne compound so he could hang out with his mob-affiliated pal Bebe Rebozo; Charles Ponzimade a name for himself for selling Florida swampland — impossible to build on— to unsuspecting Yankees.

More recently, another shady real-estate type, found liable for sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll and accused of sexual abuse (and worse) by dozens more women, bought a Palm Beach estate and now claims Florida as his home.

So, it’s hardly surprising “influencers” Andrew and Tristan Tate, British-American brothers facing charges of human trafficking and rape in Romania, flew to Florida the minute their travel restrictions were lifted last month — possibly because Trump’s special envoy pressured the Romanian government.

The Tates have fans in TrumpWorld, including lawyer Alina Habba (on the losing side of the E. Jean Carroll case) and Donald Trump Jr., who called their detention “absolute insanity.”

Elon Musk, too: He says Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer who believes women exist only to serve men, should be U.K. prime minister.

IFrame Content

But in a rare moment of good sense, Gov. Ron DeSantis bucked TrumpWorld and told those stars of the manosphere they’re “not welcome” in Florida.

Moreover, the state attorney general is investigating certain accusations, including claims they lured a Florida woman to Romania and tried to coerce herinto sex work.

Andrew Tate responded by taunting DeSantis on X: “Your wife will never win governor unless you arrest me, @GovRonDeSantis,” calling the governor a “communist” and declaring, “When Americans who are unfairly imprisoned abroad return home you betray them. You better nail me now.”

At least none of our institutions of higher learning have invited the Tates to speak on campus.

Yet.

Socratic dialog

You might keep an eye on New College, though.

Our once-renowned honors school has not exactly covered itself in glory over the past few years, what with dumping top-tier faculty, tanking in the rankings, admitting low-scoring jocks, mismanaging funds, and grossly over-paying its under-achieving president, but inviting British “comedian” Russell Brandto appear its “Socratic Stage Series” adds insult to injury.

Brand was supposed to be “in conversation” with NCF president Richard Corcoran on April 12.

New College announced the Brand appearance in February. On April 4, the British Crown Prosecution Service charged himwith one count of rape, one count of indecent assault, one count of oral rape, and two counts of sexual assault.

In a press release, New College defended bringing in Brand, wrapping itself in the flag of free speech: “After thoughtful consideration, we have decided to move forward with Russell Brand’s scheduled appearance,” citing the institution’s responsibility “to ensure a space where ideas — especially those that invite dialogue such as the topic of cancel culture and free speech, can be explored with respect, critical thought, and intellectual integrity.”

Not quite 48 hours later, New College thought better of it, announcing this “important and possibly never more relevant” conversation would be rescheduled at a later date.

NCF blamed problems with the venue (problems which apparently didn’t exist a few days ago) and those pesky journalists: “the current media climateis a distraction from the deeper purpose of the event to explore free speech.”

Brand has a court date in London on May 2.

Magic amulet

Now, you might be wondering exactly what qualifies Brand to be a guest lecturer for a public college in Florida.

He’s best known as host of a “Big Brother” spinoff called “Big Brother’s Big Mouth,” as the star of several films, including “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” often-fired radio host, and general provocateur.

He used to be a progressive (of sorts), praising Barack Obama, meeting with the Dalai Lama, and saying rude things about George W. Bush, but has lately become a conspiracy theorist who, in 2024, took to selling a $250 “magic amulet” which supposedly keeps you safe from “all sorts of evil energies.”

Right.

There’s this thing we do in higher ed called “research.” You’d think a few minutes perusal of Russell Brand’s baby talk-titled memoir, “My Booky Wook” with gleeful accounts of spitting in a woman’s face and furiously smashing a sex worker’s phone because it kept ringing while they were in flagrante (a service “for which,” says Brand, “I’d paid a lot of money”) might suggest perhaps he’s not someone likely to enrich the culture.

None of this proves Brand is a rapist, but it’s pretty clear he’s a misogynist jerk.

Brand insists that while he was once epically promiscuous, all his liaisons were “consensual,” even the ones with teenagers.

Besides, he says, he has now been washed clean by the Holy Spirit, baptized last year in the River Thames by adventure reality TV star Bear Grylls.

Criminal investigation

Well, the Lord may have forgiven him, but the justice system doesn’t work like that: In addition to charges in the U.K., Brand faces a U.S. civil suit and possible criminal investigation into allegations that he exposed himself and assaulted a woman on the set of the film “Arthur.”

The question remains: Why is New College spending taxpayer money on this guy?

Other “Socratic” speakers are (mostly) defensible: Steven Donziger, who famously sued Chevron over oil operations in Ecuador which wreaked monstrous environmental damage. (The oil company accused him of misconduct in the case; he spent three years in home detention for refusing to turn over his phone and trial records; Amnesty International fruitlessly urged former President Joe Biden to issue a pardon.)

Also scheduled for appearances at New College are Judith Butler, the distinguished gender theorist, and Stanley Fish, lawyer and literary scholar, disliked by both the right and the left.

There is also, as you’d expect, a bunch of conservatives ranging from the intellectually respectable — Mollie Hemingway, editor of “The Federalist” — to the anti-vax doctor Scott Atlas.

But casting Russell Brand as some free speech hero is flat out stupid.

Milton intervention

It’s not the first time NCF has embarrassed itself. In 2024 the college invited white supremacist “eugenicon” Steve Sailer, who says Black men are in thrall to a “primal African cult of fertility,” to “debate” Black historian Dr. Marvin Dunn.

As if you can argue “both sides” on racism. There are not two sides — unless you think the KKK makes a lot of good points.

When Hurricane Milton forced the cancellation of what promised to be a particularly unlovely spectacle, you could almost believe in the wrath of God.

Despite MAGA hissy fit-pitching and anti-DEI squawking over “censorship” and “indoctrination” on campus, conservative ideas are not suppressed or censored.

FSU recently hosted economist and Reagan acolyte Glenn Loury; the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center has showcased Republican pollsters and American Enterprise Institute luminaries.

This is as it should be.

But there’s a difference between a university fostering honest discussion of academic freedom, ideology, and prejudice, and promoting a man who could soon be convicted of sexual assault.

Scrubbing the record

Florida’s Republican junta has convinced itself higher education turns innocent students into tree-hugging transgender Marxists who read nothing but books on critical race theory.

Terrified they’ll be penalized financially and every other way, colleges and universities have busied themselves scrubbing websites of incendiary words such as “women,” “Black,” “institutional” and “trauma.”

FSU has deleted and “archived” its posts on high-achieving students before 2023, claiming, in fluent bureaucratic nonsense-speak, they did it to get rid of “outdated information to enhance user experience and ensuring our webpages load quickly and efficiently on all devices.”

In case you’re not buying that one, they’re also calling it “routine maintenance.”

A cynical person might think this is really about obscuring official praise of students who might be queer or working in currently disfavored fields of study.

A cynical person might also wonder if state government wants to use higher education to return us to an imagined past when white Christian men were in charge of everything and everything was absolutely great, especially for white Christian men.

One of the governor’s picks for the Board of Trustees at University of West Florida, an institution he calls “a left-wing college,” wanted to take us back to the 1950s.

Scott Yenor, an academic nonentity at Boise State in Idaho, thinks only “non-Jewish white men” should be in leadership positions.

He says “independent women” are “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” and proclaims, “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers,” not have successful careers, certainly not in the manly fields of science, medicine, and the law.

Even some of Florida’s loudest and proudest reactionaries objected to Yenor’s weird ideas about women and obvious antisemitism.

Sen. Randy Fine, the state’s only Jewish Republican legislator (until he was elected to Congress on April 1) raised the alarm.

Back to Idaho

Indeed, Yenor is so out there that several hundred citizens, including students, alumni, former trustees, and donors, held a town hall in Pensacola — deep red Pensacola — urging the Florida Senate to reject his nomination.

Former Republican legislators, business leaders, donors, local officials, and members of the Jewish community expressed dismay. UWF President Emerita Judy Bense urged people to tell the governor “this is wrong.”

The amazing thing is, they won. Yenor, who had not yet been confirmed by the Senate, withdrew from consideration.

Sen. Don Gaetz, father of the egregious Matt, celebrated Yenor’s decision: “Gentlemen don’t go where no one wants them.”

Unacquainted with what gentlemen do, the governor is throwing a tantrum, blaming Fine, whom he describes as “repellent,” snarling, “Let’s just consider the source. I mean, that same senator called me antisemitic,” and accusing others of distorting Yenor’s record, “trying to dredge up statements” he calls “flimsy.”

Booting Yenor back to Idaho is a small victory for UWF and the basic decency we should expect from Florida’s state institutions.

“Rescheduling” Brand is, too, although New College is probably beyond redemption: Opening the campus to white supremacists and accused rapists does not demonstrate a commitment to vigorous examination of social norms and political pieties, or a bold assertion of free speech.

It’s evidence of decay.

NCF is now an educational ruin, lovely buildings perched on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, intellectually and morally empty.

---

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/31/florida-new-college-conservative-trustees-00080541

taLLAHASSEE, Fla. — The newly-installed conservative board of trustees at New College of Florida ousted its current president in favor of former state education commissioner Richard Corcoran Tuesday, launching the initial move in reshaping the campus under the vision of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The decision came at the first board meeting since DeSantis appointed six new trustees with the idea of overhauling the liberal arts college in Sarasota into a more conservative-leaning institution. That track was accelerated Tuesday when the board paved the way for new leadership as students and parents protested the major changes that appear bound for New College.

“Some have said these recent appointments amount to a partisan takeover of the college. This is not correct,” said trusteeMatthew Spalding, a constitutional government professor and vice president at Hillsdale College’s D.C. campuswho was appointed by DeSantis. “It’s not a takeover — it’s a renewal.”

A leadership switch from President Patricia Okker to Corcoran as interim leader is one of several moves made Tuesday by the board, which also signaled its intent to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion programs on campus — all policies pushed by DeSantis. The changes are major developments at the school spurred by the new appointees, including Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who has advised DeSantis on critical race theory, and Eddie Speir, the co-founder of Inspiration Academy, a Christian charter school in Bradenton, Fla.

Tuesday’s meeting was met with apprehension from dozens of students and parents who protested what they called a “hostile takeover” at New College. They urged Okker to stay on as president and push back against the new mandates from the DeSantis administration to model the school as a“Hillsdale of the South” in reference to the private conservative religious “classical“ college in Michigan.

Okker in an emotional address told the board — and the campus — that she couldn’t continue to serve as president amid accusations that the students are being inundated with liberal indoctrination.

“The reality is, and it’s a hard reality and it’s a sad reality, but the vision that we created together is not the vision I have been given as a mandate here,” Okker said.

In remaking the board at New College, the DeSantis administration said the school was “completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning” and in need of change following downward enrollment trends. To move on from Okker, trustees agreed to a “generous” exit package that includes at least 12 months of paid professional development leave and benefits. Corcoran is unable to begin serving until March, leaving Okker’s chief of staff Bradley Thiessen in charge until then.

“New leadership is the expectation and I think it makes sense,” Rufo said at the meeting. “I don’t think it’s a condemnation of Dr. Okker, scholarship or skills or character.”

DeSantis’ changes at New College follow other efforts to reshape higher education in Florida. Earlier Tuesday, the GOP governor proposed several changes to Florida’s university system, including pressing the GOP-led Legislature to cut all funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to allow university leaders to launch tenure review of professors. Last year, DeSantis and state Republicans placed GOP allies in top university posts and pushed legislation that could limit how professors teach race.

New College is also now set to review its Office of Outreach & Inclusive Excellence at the request of Rufo as part of the state’s stance against diversity, equity and inclusion programs in schools. Rufo originally pushed to abolish the office outright, including four positions, and take other actions tied to diversity and equity, but decided to request further details on the program for a discussion in February.

New College trustees also want former Senate President Bill Galvano to serve as their general counsel and attorney. They asked the interim president on Tuesday to enter negotiations with the former Republican lawmaker who practices law in Sarasota.

Tuesday’s meeting was tense at times, with audience members frequently shouting over and at the new trustees as they spoke. Several parents and students addressed the board before they huddled, often criticizing their plans to retool the university and asking them to leave the college alone.

Some faculty said students felt “hopeless” about what could happen at the school, which is a unique college of under 700 undergraduates where students craft personalized education plans and don’t receive letter grades.

“Many students came here to feel safe and access the education that is their right as Floridians,” Diego Villada, Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, told the board. “And the impulse to make this a place where race, intersectionality and DEI are banned indicates to them that you want everyone to be the same – to be like you.”

Trustees, though, made it clear that the New College overhaul is fully underway, a message that came the same day DeSantis pledged to invest millions of dollars into recruiting faculty to the school.

“The campus needs a deep culture change. You sat up here, you called us racists, sexists, bigots, outsiders,” said trustee Mark Bauerlein, professor emeritus of English at Emory University who was appointed by DeSantis. “We are now in a position of authority in the college. And the accusations are telling us that something is wrong here.”

sieg heil

left-leaning media outlets have villainized Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, painting his recent moves in the Sunshine State’s education system as a hostile takeover from the Right. So Matthew Spalding, a professor at Hillsdale College whom DeSantis recently appointed to the New College of Florida’s board of trustees, decided to set the record straight.

“DeSantis Allies Plot the Hostile Takeover of a Liberal College,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in The New York Times. Goldberg referred to Hillsdale College as “the template for this reimagined New College” and noted that the conservative Hillsdale—based in southern Michigan—worked with then-President Donald Trump to create a patriotic education curriculum.

“DeSantis moves to turn a progressive Fla. college into a conservative one,” runs the headline on Valerie Strauss’s **Washington Post**story. The subheadline: “His administration says he aims to make it a ‘Hillsdale of the South.’” Strauss brands Hillsdale a “bastion of far-right conservatism.”

“A Tiny Christian College in Michigan Is Infiltrating Florida’s Schools” runs the headline on Mary Harris’ Slate story.

The New Republic‘s Jack McCordick also slammed DeSantis’ appointment of Spalding, writing that Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute “eagerly hitched their wagons to Trump” and are “home to some of the country’s most notorious coup plotters and insurrectionists.”

McCordick suggested that Spalding’s appointment by DeSantis represents a threat to the “uniquely proactive nature of the New College’s student body.” He quoted alumnus Derek Black, who credited that student body with his conversion from a “white nationalist activist,” implying that the governor’s new appointments might enable white nationalism to emerge at the school.

These media outlets eagerly cited remarks from Christopher Rufo, a Manhattan Institute scholar best known for combating critical race theory and homelessness. DeSantis also named Rufo to New College’s board. In remarks to The New York Times, Rufo said he aimed toreverse a Marxist “march through the institutions.”

“If we can take this high-risk, high-reward gambit and turn it into a victory, we’re going to see conservative state legislators starting to reconquer public institutions all over the United States,” Rufo told the Times.

The media outlets also cited James Uthmeier, DeSantis’ chief of staff, who told the Daily Caller: “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college … more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”

“Florida is where woke goes to die,” DeSantis said in his victory speech following his nearly 20-point reelection victory in November.

The Republican governor has taken aim at critical race theory, a framework that claims to find “systemic racism” in American institutions and that critics say leads educators to treat white students as oppressors and treat black students and other minorities as oppressed. DeSantis also has opposed transgender ideology and signed a bill protecting parental rights in education and preventing institutionalized instruction of LGBT lessons in kindergarten through third grade.

Spalding, vice president of Washington operations and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale’s satellite campus in the nation’s capital, did not address DeSantis’ program but insisted that the political controversy is “overwrought.”

Spalding, a former director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation, parent organization of The Daily Signal, also said he doesn’t aim to turn New College into a carbon copy of Hillsdale College. Rather, he told The Daily Signal, he intends to champion liberal arts and classical education at the historic Florida institution.

“The political controversy surrounding recent appointments to the board of New College of Florida is overwrought,” Spalding said in a written statement provided to The Daily Signal. “I am honored by the appointment and look forward to engaging in reform to achieve educational excellence.”

“As a professor, dean, and vice president at asuccessful liberal arts college, my focus is on the work at hand: restoring New College’s ‘distinctive mission’ as the ‘residential liberal arts honors college’ of Florida,” Spalding said. “I appreciate the complimentary nods to Hillsdale College, but we are not going to serve New College’s mission by remaking it into a carbon copy of another institution.”

“In the liberal arts, the college—which means a partnership, one between students and faculty—works together and comes into conversation with great thinkersand writers who’ve asked timeless questions about human purpose, about the good and justice, and how to live well,” he added. “The very aim of liberal arts education is to liberate the mind from current fads and popular ideologies by inviting students to address these questions in pursuit of the truth about what it means to be fully human. That pursuit transcends contemporary politics.”

Getting “such an education teaches one how to think, not what to think,” Spalding added. “The surging enrollment at my home institution and others like it shows that students hunger for such serious academic inquiry.”

The author of this article, Tyler O’Neil, is a Hillsdale College alumnus.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

no protest?

aha yikes used to be k12? see campus free sp BS

an maya 1 23

Amid his attempt to ban race-related conversations from higher education classrooms, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis distributed a memo requesting course data from state colleges that teach “diversity, equity and inclusion,” reports ABC News.

The request comes after a judge recently temporarily blocked the passing of the governor’s Stop WOKE (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act, which would ban race-related coursework, also known as critical race theory (CRT) from college and university classrooms.

In a statement from his office regarding the proposed law, DeSantis said, "No one should be instructed to feel as if they are not equal or shamed because of their race. In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida."

Those who support DeSantis’ law believe CRT is “discriminatory” and that students should not learn about the history of oppression and privilege in the U.S.

Critical race theory — taught in mostly graduate school programs, and not K-12 classrooms — according to The Brookings Institution, asserts that “U.S. social institutions (e.g., the criminal justice system, education system, labor market, housing market, and healthcare system) are laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race.”

ProPublica recently reported that DeSantis :{referred to the :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:**Stop WOKE Act** as the “the strongest legislation in the nation against the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory.”

On the other hand, those who adamantly disagree with the law say it restricts free speech. Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali called it “a racist dog whistle but with a facially neutral cover.”

The memo says, “Governor Ron DeSantis has prioritized a cost-effective higher education system that delivers high-quality service to Floridians to best prepare them for employment.” It continues, “Additionally, state law requires dutiful attention to curriculum content at our higher education systems.”

A State University System of Florida Board of Governors representative said all 12 colleges confirmed receipt of the governor’s memo, according to ABC. And each institution is required to submit requested data by Friday, January 13.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) is reportedly going to resign. Sasse has become a frequent target of the Trump-wing of the Republican Party claiming that he's nothing more than a "RINO" (Republican in Name Only) and that he isn't loyal enough to former President Donald Trump.

Sasse was seen as a young Republican rising star until Trump took over the party and made him a target.

According to KFAB radio host Ian Swanson, Sasse is being offered a job at theUniversity of Florida. Sasse previously served as the 15th President of Midland University until he was elected to the U.S. Senate. He didn't attend the University of Florida and has no otherwise obvious ties to the state.

Politico also reported Thursday that Sasse plans to resign his Senate seat, citing "two people familiar with the Nebraska Republican’s plans."

The Nebraska governor would then appoint a replacement until the seat comes up for reelection.

state of Florida is under fire for trying to silence professors who want to testify about voting rights

Cody Fenwick

October 31, 2021

After public outrage over its decision to block professors from testifying as expert witnesses about voting rights, the University of Florida tried to defend itself this week by issuing a statement claiming to support "academic....

lucas $

https://blog.independent.org/2020/05/27/the-stand-at-paxton-county-puts-leftist-activism-at-center-of-corruption-drama/

:{ Stand at Paxton County:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, an independently produced drama now streaming on Netflix, has a surprisingly straightforward message: Our freedoms and property rights are at risk when dogmatic special interests use the legislative process to achieve their goals. Moreover, poorly designed legislation opens the door to corruption.

The movie, produced by Forrest Films (founded by entrepreneurs :{Forrest and Charlotte Lucas:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:), does something else unusual for contemporary films: It raises awareness and makes relevant the plight of ranchers and farmers under a gun from political activists. Many of these advocates know little, or don’t seem to care, about this industry, its culture, and its values.

While a few think tanks and other nonprofits work on these issues—the :{Mountain States Legal Foundation:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: and :{Property and Environment Research Center:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: (PERC), to name two—contemporary filmmakers largely ignore the political threats to the modern small farm. As a result, even well-meaning activists tend to misinterpret, or misunderstand, the nature of agricultural businesses and family-owned enterprises that work on or beyond the urban fringe.

The story underlying The Stand, inspired by a real event, centers on a family’s attempt to save its farm from corrupt public officials in South Dakota. Dell Connelly (Michael O’Neill, Messiah, Scandal), an aging and ailing ranch owner, is coming out of a particularly brutal winter. His horses and livestock are the bread and butter of his operations. His horses are skinny and, to the naked eye, look malnourished. Connelly and other ranchers know that this condition is cyclical and that their horses will soon return to a healthy weight.

A new state law, however, allows anyone to claim animal abuse, triggering an investigation by a local veterinarian (Marwa Bernstein). Connelly’s livelihood, and the family farm, are threatened when the vet declares his horses unfit and abused, and the local sheriff (Christopher McDonald, Ballers, Real Bros of Simi Valley) seizes his livestock.

All of this is suspicious to Connelly’s estranged daughter Janna (Jacqueline Toboni, The L Word, Grimm), an army combat medic summoned home when her father becomes gravely ill. She sees that the ranch has fallen into disrepair despite her father’s hiring of a full-time ranch hand. Nevertheless, the horses, including her favorite, seem healthy if a bit thin from the winter. She begins to investigate. Soon, Janna suspects the long-time sheriff is hiding something, and may be in collusion with a local veterinarian.

The Stand is surprisingly engaging despite its use of well-trodden themes. Corrupt law enforcement figures, particularly sheriffs, :{are a staple of the traditional westerns and modern thrillers:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: (e.g., Unforgiven, Rambo: First Blood, Young Guns, just to name a few). The estranged child returning to find their roots is also so familiar it’s cliché. But Toboni’s portrayal of the daughter, pushed away then reluctantly pulled back by family obligations, is convincing.

The twist that The Standbrings to the screen is its explicit tie-on to state level politics and the local corruption it engenders. Fortunately, the plot follows a more conventional thriller line, bringing the audience along as Janna unearths clues to the corruption even as it puts her life at risk. Thus, the audience engages through the drama rather than a lecture on politics. While the plot and the climax are predictable, the twists and setting are sufficiently different that audiences are likely to stay focused and in the story.

The sheriff and the veterinarian are not nuanced characters, but given the genre and film tradition, most audiences won’t stumble on these tropes. Janna’s journey from estranged child driven away by a difficult father to later appreciate the values, hard work, and simplicity of ranch life is well scripted and convincing. The movie also wrestles effectively with the tension between a population increasingly distant from its agrarian legacy, and largely ignorant of its practices, and those who remain committed to the lifestyle and business.

The Standis most likely to lose its audience when it fails to give dimension to the animal rights activists. The advocates are caricatures, equating them to the greed of the sheriff and vet. The failure to give these characters more complexity limits the movie’s ability to elevate the story and broaden its appeal to general audiences.

Nevertheless, The Stand at Paxton County is entertaining and a welcome entry into an emerging genre (now dominated by progressives) of films crafted to entertain and raise awareness about social-justice issues. In this case, the injustice is meted out against ranchers and farmers. The movie and Forrest Films deserves praise for addressing this little understood or recognized problem in rural America even if it might stumble in reaching a truly broad audience.

Samuel R. Staley is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Director of the DeVoe L. Moore Center in the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy at Florida State University.He is a contributing author to the Independent books, *Property Rights* and *Housing America*.

Beacon Posts by Samuel R. Staley | Full Biography and Publications

DeVoe L. Moore Center is an interdisciplinary, applied public policy research and teaching center examining the role of the private sector in addressing pressing concerns relevant to Florida. The center uses a market-oriented lens to examine, develop, and propose policy recommendations and guidance for policymakers at the state and local level.

The DeVoe Moore Center was created in 1998 through an endowment established by Tallahassee-based entrepreneur DeVoe L. Moore. The Center supplements its operational funds through grants and individual contributions that enhance the Center’s mission and strategic goal. An independent Advisory Board, established in the founding gift agreement, regularly monitors the Center’s work and progress.

Keith Ihlanfeldt, PhD

DeVoe Moore Eminent Scholar and Professor of Economics

(850) 645–0075 | kihlanfeldt@fsu.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Keith Ihlandfeldt is an internationally recognized scholar in urban and regional science, having been elected a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International in 2009. He has contributed foundational work on housing segregation, job accessibility, residential mobility, growth management, impact fees, and state and local public finance. In addition to his academic work, he has conducted research for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Department of Commerce, the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Federal Transit Administration, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and others. He has served on the editorial boards of leading research journals, including the Review of Regional Studies, Economic Development Quarterly, Journal of Urban Economics, and the Journal of Regional Science. He earned his PhD and MA in economics from Washington University and his BA from Illinois Wesleyan University.

Randall G. Holcombe, PhD

DeVoe L. Moore Professor of Economics

(850) 644-7095 | holcombe@fsu.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Randall Holcombe is a leading scholar on public finance and public policy. He is the author of more than fifteen books, including Political Capitalism (Cambridge University Press), Entrepreneurship and Economic Progress (Routledge), and Producing Prosperity: An Inquiry into the Operation of the Market Process (Routledge). He is a former member of Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, former president of the Public Choice Society, former president of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, and a Senior Fellow with the James Madison Institute. His scholarly articles have appeared in the economics profession’s leading journals, including the American Economic Review, National Tax Journal, the Journal of Public Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, and Public Choice, among others. Writing his dissertation under Nobel Prize-winning economist James M. Buchanan, Dr. Holcombe earned his PhD and MA in economics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and his BSBA in economics with honors from the University of Florida.

Samuel R. Staley, PhD

Director

(850) 645-9694 | sstaley@fsu.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Sam Staley became director of the DeVoe Moore Center in January 2014 after serving as Managing Director from September 2011 to December 2013. In addition to his responsibilities providing strategic direction and supervision of center operations and programs, he teaches advanced undergraduate and professional master’s courses in social entrepreneurship, economic development, land use and regulation, urban policy, and research methods.

Prior to joining Florida State, Dr. Staley was the Robert W. Galvin Fellow at Reason Foundation, an internationally recognized public policy think tank based in Los Angeles where he worked on issues such as transportation system management and performance, public-private partnerships, growth management, and regulatory reform. While at Reason Foundation, he managed the China Mobility Project, traveling to China more than 30 times as supervisor of academic research projects on transportation policy and finance.

He has more than 25 years of experience in urban policy and is the author, co-author, or editor of five books on public policy and more than 100 professional articles and reports. His research has appeared in leading academic journals, including the Journal of the American Planning Association, Housing Policy Debate, Town Planning Review, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, and the Journal of Transportation Engineering. He earned his PhD in public administration from The Ohio State University, his MS in applied economics from Wright State University, and BA in economics & public policy from Colby College. He also studied economics as a Bradley Fellow in the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University from 1989-90.

Crystal Taylor, PhD, AICP

Director of Research

cjtaylor@fsu.edu

Crystal Taylor joined the DeVoe L. Moore Center in 2019 as Director of Public Policy. Dr. Taylor brings practical and classroom experience into her role at the center. An award-winning instructor, she has taught a wide range of courses on megacities, urban development, land-use planning, sustainable development, infrastructure planning, and collective decisions. An expert on environmental and healthy communities planning, she has conducted greenway research with a focus on Safe Routes to School policy. Dr. Taylor has also conducted program evaluations and collaborated on plans for the Department of Education and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. She has studied in Japan and conducted field research in Ghana. Her academic research has appeared in professional journals such as Cities and Health, the Journal of Physical Activity and Health, the Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies, and the Journal of Environmental Health. Dr. Taylor earned her PhD in urban planning from Florida State University, MS in geography from the University of Alabama, and BS in management from Missouri State University.

Monica Laughlin

Business Manager

(850) 644-9333| mlaughlin@fsu.edu

Monica Laughlin has been on the campus of Florida State University since the endowment of the Claude Pepper Center in the 1990’s. Prior to that time she served on staff with the foundation that endowed the Center at FSU and assisted in its transition to the university. She has served as Business Manager of the Pepper Center since 2005 providing support in the areas of project management, financial management, human resources and other activities and initiatives of the Center. In 2022 she assumed serving as the Business Manager of DeVoe L. Moore Center to provide the same means of support to the Center.

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

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.

...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:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, 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

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.

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 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....

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

ref

https://thinkprogress.org/proof-that-koch-backed-professors-are-using-universities-to-spread-right-wing-policies-5457ffb61ae9/

“Economic freedom centers”— or institutes with conservative, libertarian missions that are backed by the Charles Koch Foundation — are tightly controlled by the interests of the conservative foundation, according to remarks from Koch-backed professors and executives at the Association of Private Enterprise Education’s annual meeting in Las Vegas.

The remarks were recorded by UnKoch My Campus, a group that focuses on the influence of powerful donors on research and coursework in universities, and shared by Greenpeace staff. At the event, Koch-backed professors and Charles Koch Foundation executives said that students act as “foot soldiers” for free enterprise ideals, deans will take money from anyone, and the slightest mention of the foundation’s legal team can bring universities back in line.

Koch-backed institutes made their way back into the news lately after recent reports that $5 million was earmarked for these centers at Arizona public universities. The American Association of University Professors is also unhappy about George Mason University’s relationship with Koch-backed academics. AAUP Associate Secretary Anita Levy recently sent a letter to the president of George Mason University and the chair of State Council of Higher Education for Virginia to express concern over renaming GMU’s law school the “Antonin Scalia Law School” after having received $30 million from the Charles Koch Foundation and an anonymous donor. GMU has received a lot of money from the Kochs over the years. Between 2011–2014, the university received almost $48 million from the Koch Foundation, according to the Associated Press.

The remarks at the annual meeting reveal some of the top strategies employed by Koch-backed institutes to wield political influence through the university system.

1. Rely on government funding.

According to George Mason University economics and philosophy professor Peter Boettke, who serves as director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, these institutes care about being accredited because otherwise they wouldn’t receive government funding.

“The third party payer is government. Right?” Boettke said. “So this is the economics of the university. Not saying, by the way, from a Libertarian point of view that it’s the best thing in the world, but, you have to recognize and take advantage of it in building programs.”

2. Use the threat of foundation lawyers to ensure money is spent your way.

Lindenwood University professor Howard Wall, who is the director of the Hammond Institute and the Center for Economics and the Environment and serves as the chair of economics at the university, said it’s a good idea to reference the foundation’s legal team when dealing with challenges from administrators.

“It’s mostly inside the university where you get some resistance from administrators getting the power to decide how money is spent, and they say ‘Oh, you have to do this,’” Wall said. “And then I’ve used the phrase, ‘Are you sure that the Koch Foundation’s lawyers will read that the same way you are?’ And then they figure, ‘Well they must have pretty good lawyers.’”

3. Use the university’s intellectual credibility as way to gain access to media.

Boettke explained how having a communications team helps the center have political “impact.” He also explained how, given universities’ role in public policy, working inside one offers political advantages.

“When we think about a university center there’s all this intellectual activity happening and there’s an opportunity to leverage it over and over and over again,” he said. “These media people are able to book radio, television, different sorts of appearances … They can also play an interesting role in engaging with different kinds of stakeholders in these social institutions. That can mean arranging state legislative testimony to make sure that, you know, these kinds of ideas have a seat on the table in public policy.”

4. Make it a 5-year agreement, not an endowment.

University of Louisville endowed professor of economics Stephan Gohmann, who supports right-to-work laws, explained the thought process behind getting a 5-year funding agreement — an explanation repeated by Charlie Ruger, director of university investments for the Charles Koch Foundation.

“This is why it’s a 5-year agreement instead of an endowment. If it’s an endowment, as soon as we leave as the directors, they’ll say ‘Oh, we got $10 million dollars, let’s go spend it on political science or something else…sociology,’” Gohmann said. “But if the money’s just coming in annually, either the money is spend how it’s supposed to be spent or it isn’t coming in.”

5. Fight FOIA requests from groups or publications you disagree with.

Ruger said the foundation is all for transparency, but that they won’t freely give information to a “bully.”

“We’re all for the idea of transparency, we’ve got nothing to hide, there’s nothing untoward happening. All of our philanthropy is based on faculty governance, academic freedom and donor intent, and those things aren’t in conflict,” Ruger said.

Then he later added, “Our position on that is, no, don’t give them anything they ask for, till they go through that process. It makes them look foolish that they file lawsuits, they hire attorneys, and then they get nothing. Over time, I think they’re gonna learn, this is an overuse of open records laws.”

6. Use affirmative action to get conservative students inside the university.

One of the most interesting comments on recruitment came from University of New Orleans associate professor and founding director of the Alexis de Tocqueville Project, Chris Surprenant. He described a program run by the Tocqueville Project where high achieving students can take classes for college credit in areas such as history, political, economy, law, and philosophy. Surprenant mentioned the importance of students being exposed to texts other than Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. The program prepares students to embrace many of the ideals that Koch-backed professors support.

Ralph Wilson, a senior researcher with UnKoch My Campus who attended the event, told ThinkProgress that Surprenant was talking of local high schools in New Orleans that had a low-income population of mostly black and Hispanic students.

“And you know, I think we’ve made these lives better. We’ve given them an opportunity to be incredibly successful coming from families where, say single mother, didn’t go to college, being raised by their grandparents who both didn’t go to college,” Surprenant said.

The cost of participating in the program is $120 for each three-credit course, which doesn’t include the cost of textbooks. He added that affirmative action, or “prejudices” as he puts it, can be used to the advantage of the foundation, Wilson explained.

“So, there are certain prejudices that college admissions committees operate on, in terms of people that have a leg up over others,” Surprenant said. “We’ve been very successful at finding ways to use those prejudices to our advantage, and to get students into universities who, if they were rich, white, middle class students, maybe they don’t get into Stanford or Harvard, but we provide these students with an opportunity that gets them up to the level where they can get in, and then the admissions commission prejudices sort of kick them, kick them over.”

#EDUCATION, #KOCH BROTHERS

ref2

https://thinkprogress.org/kochs-fund-energy-think-tanks-in-utah-482ab143e66d/

When asmall think tank, funded in large part by petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch’s foundations, and a Utah State Universityinstitute began publishing the same research, people started to take notice. Further examination of the relationship is leading critics to question whether the Koch brothers are using the cover of an academic institution to push their anti-renewable energy, pro-fossil fuel agenda to a larger audience.

Strata Policy, an independent think tank founded by Utah State University professor Randy Simmons, is closely tied with a university research group called the Institute of Political Economy. Simmons and the other professors who staff the Koch-funded Institute of Political Economy also hold positions at Strata Policy. Simmons, who previously:{served:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: as the Charles G. Koch Professor of Political Economy at the university, runs both the on-campus and off-campus groups.

“It seems obvious that they are gleaning the university’s brand and prestige for not only the Institute of Political Economy, but also Strata,” Connor Gibson, a researcher for Greenpeace’s investigations team, told ThinkProgress. Gibson cited a report released earlier this year critical of North Carolina’s pro-renewable energy policy that was:{co-branded:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: with the names of both Strata Policy and the Institute of Political Economy.

Charles and David Koch are :{well-known:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: for bankrolling universities as part of their strategy to bring a conservative worldview to new generations of students. At the same time, the brothers spend millions funding independent think tanks and advocacy groups that work to implement corporate-friendly policies at the federal and state levels.

With both Strata Policy and the Institute of Political Economy, the Kochs have found a way to do both — influence students and policymakers — within the confines of a single university. They are funding an independent think tank staffed by Utah State University professors, while simultaneously giving millions to the university to spread an anti-regulation ideology among its students.

“They are gleaning the university’s brand and prestige for not only the Institute of Political Economy, but also Strata.”

Where Utah State University differs from other Koch-funded schools is that Charles Koch is giving money to both on-campus and off-campus operations, according to Gibson. “It’s all the same people. I don’t know if they even try to determine where the ethical boundaries are and whether they are getting taxpayer money from the legislature or whether they are getting money from Charles Koch and whether the output is coming from the university brand or coming from the Strata brand,” he said. “They really don’t seem to care.”

According to the university, funding that comes to the Institute of Political Economy goes to support faculty salaries and student programming. Money has never flowed from the Institute of Political Economy to Strata Policy, “an off-campus organization unaffiliated with either the university at large or the university’s Institute of Political Economy,” said Tim Vitale, executive director of public relations and marketing for Utah State University.

The Institute of Political Economy has produced research projects that are then shared by Strata Policy via social media and on its website, Simmons said in an email to ThinkProgress, but he maintained that the relationship was purely research-focused.

“On some reports, the authors are listed as affiliated with Strata, because those authors were contributors to the project. While Strata employees sometimes have the opportunity to contribute to IPE projects due to their expertise on a given topic, they are not compensated by Utah State University or the Institute of Political Economy for their contributions,” Simmons explained.

This is how the Kochs’ anti-renewable agenda becomes White House policy

Koch-tied officials “got their wish” with Trump’s attacks on climate action, environment.

Simmons has produced Institute of Political Economy projects as part of his normal research load, Vitale said. The Institute for Political Economy has never promoted Strata Policy, although Strata Policy might have used Institute for Policy research for its own reasons, he explained. “Other organizations — any organization — can access IPE research and use it as they see fit,” he said.

Utah State University, a public university, climbed into second place on the list of Koch-funded universities earlier this year when the school:{accepted:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: a $25 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation. Prior to the latest donation, the university’s Institute of Political Economy was already receiving large sums from the Kochs.

The university will receive the Koch money over the next 10 years in increments of $2.5 million a year. George Mason University, a public university in Virginia, is the largest recipient of Koch funding,:{earning:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: it the nickname “Koch U.”

The Huntsman Foundation, founded by conservative industrialist Jon M. Huntsman Sr., also:{donated:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: $25 million to the university to launch the:{Center for Growth and Opportunity:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: and expand the Huntsman Scholar Program. The new center will be located at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, named after the industrialist. The Koch and Huntsman money will allow the school to hire several additional professors.

“The Kochs have extended influence to institutions of higher education, setting up grants at universities to hire professors that teach the Kochs’ anti-tax, anti-regulation business and political philosophies to mold young minds to fall in step with the Kochs’ industrial wishes going forward through the 21st century,” Salt Lake Tribune columnist Paul Rolly:{wrote:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: in 2016.

While Charles Koch gives a substantial amount to Utah State University, foundations and organizations associated with both brothers are also funding Strata Policy to advance many of the same anti-renewable energy, pro-fossil fuel aims. A ThinkProgress review of Strata Policy’s funders (according to data provided by :{Conservative Transparency:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, :{Guidestar:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, and :{CitizenAudit:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:) revealed that since 2011, its donations included at least:

$2,260,500 from the Charles Koch Foundation, the primary private foundation through which Charles Koch funds higher education programs.
$183,000 from the Searle Freedom Trust, which consists of wealth inherited from G.D. Searle & Company, a company that created the artificial sweetener aspartame marketed as NutraSweet. The foundation also has :{funded:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: Americans for Prosperity, the American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heartland Institute, and many other right-wing groups.
$165,559 from the Apgar Foundation, a foundation created by the widow of John “Jack” N. Apgar Jr., founder of Somerset Tire Service, an automotive service and tire company based in New Jersey. The foundation was created to:{promote:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: the teaching of “Western Civilization” on college campuses.
$93,000 from the:{Institute for Energy Research:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, a right-wing energy think tank funded by groups linked to the Koch brothers.
$51,600 from the Charles Koch Institute, Charles Koch’s anti-government “educational” arm created from the :{Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: in September 2011.

Strata Policy describes itself as the “premier research hub on environmental, energy, and public land issues.” The Institute of Political Economy focuses on similar energy and environmental issues. Both entities have advocated against renewable portfolio standards in states, published anti-renewable energy reports, and sent Utah State University professors to testify in states against renewable energy.

In a 2015:{report:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: opposing a renewable portfolio standard in Kansas, Strata Policy and the Institute of Political Economy concluded that the standard “will increase fiscal and economic costs significantly between now and 2020” that will include a $171-million “burden” on Kansas electricity ratepayers and a loss of 795 jobs. “When major errors in the study’s methods are corrected, the study’s results actually confirm that state Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards (RPS) like those in Kansas create hundreds of jobs and save consumers tens of millions of dollars,” Michael Goggin, senior director of research at the American Wind Energy Association, wrote in a:{blog post:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:.

The Institute of Political Economy :{issued:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: a report in 2016 on a renewable portfolio standard report for Pennsylvania — authored by four out of the five researchers who prepared the co-branded Kansas report — that reached similar conclusions. The report found that Pennsylvania’s renewable portfolio standard has contributed to an increase of 10 percent in the unemployment rate.

Synapse Energy Research, in a :{study:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: released in late 2016, countered that Pennsylvania’s renewable portfolio standard has not harmed the state’s economy. In fact, the study explains that meeting Pennsylvania’s electric power needs entirely with renewables by 2050 is both achievable — and economic. Instead of greater unemployment, Pennsylvania could see a net increase of nearly 500,000 job‐years from 2015 to 2050 under a scenario in which the state moved to 100-percent renewables during this period, the consulting firm found. (One job for one year equals one “job year” and if that job continues for another 12 months, it’s two “job years.”)

In 2015, Ryan Yonk, an assistant professor at Utah State University and executive director of research at Strata Policy,:{ testified:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: before :{Ohio:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: and :{Kansas:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: lawmakers, where renewable energy standards were in jeopardy, to lay out his group’s research in opposition to the state renewable energy policies. Utah State University allows faculty to conduct outside consulting work; faculty members are not permitted to “exploit the institution’s name or their relationship to the institution for personal reasons unrelated to their legitimate academic or professional activities” and must avoid “creating the impression that they are representing the institution in public appearances or statements,” according to the university’s faculty code.

Most recently, Strata Policy partnered with the Institute of Political Economy to refocus on North Carolina as lawmakers were once again debating the state’s renewable energy policy. Updated in 2017, the partner organizations’:{report:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: found that the renewable portfolio standard in North Carolina has faced :{opposition:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: since its creation, including from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch-funded group that drafts model legislation for states. “North Carolina is still where the action is,” Gibson said.

The Koch-funded groups, though, failed in their attempt to undermine North Carolina’s renewable energy policy. A new law:{created:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: a competitive bidding process that will bring more than 2.6 gigawatts of new solar into service over a three-and-a-half-year period. The Solar Energy Industries Association lauded the bill as one that “will significantly enhance the solar market in North Carolina.”

Strata Policy “waged these state-level attacks” because “they want to drive regulation to the state, where it’s more controllable and because that’s where their dollar really goes the farthest ” Gibson said.

Recently, Strata Policy has begun to expand its portfolio beyond attacks on renewable energy to embrace a Republican-led effort to allow greater use of public lands by extraction companies. Two years ago, the think tank won a public relations contract from the state of Utah to promote its efforts to force the federal government to transfer control of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands to the state. The Utah Legislature:{approved:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: $2 million in funding in 2015 for Strata Policy and other groups to promote the benefits of turning over federal land to the state.

Utah Republicans believe that allowing the state to control the lands will create more economic value by clearing the way for more oil wells, coal mines, and tree harvests. Public lands supporters fear states would sell off the lands that belong to all Americans, allowing industry to destroy the environment.

Simmons’ Strata Policy “landed the public relations contract for the Utah Legislature’s efforts to wrest control of 31 million acres of public land from the federal government,” Rolly wrote in his op-ed.

Strata Policy has put out several studies on public lands issues. In a 2016 op-ed, Yonk:{argued:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: that economic activity in Utah and other Western states is “limited by the decisions of federal land bureaucrats.”

In May, Simmons:{authored:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: a report that recommended the Department of the Interior reduce the size of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah “to more appropriately encompass sites of legitimate historical and scientific interest.” Native American groups :{pushed:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: for the monument designation for years to protect their artifacts. The position embraced by Simmons is the same as Republican lawmakers in Utah; once Trump won the presidency, the lawmakers immediately began lobbying the new administration to make reducing the size of the Bears Ears monument a priority.

Tribes gear up for major legal battle with Trump over Bears Ears National Monument

Native leaders baffled by Zinke’s claim that they are “very happy” with a potentially reduced monument.

Strata Policy joined other conservative groups, many of them also funded by the Kochs, to thank President Donald Trump for signing an:{executive order:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: calling for a sweeping review of national monument designations. In the June:{letter:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: to Trump, Strata Policy and the other groups said the support the criteria in the executive “to reduce and rescind egregious national monuments where local support exists to do so.”

The :{American Lands Council:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, a group formed to gain control of federal lands across the West, has also :{received:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: funding from Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by the Kochs. TheIdaho Freedom Foundation, which also signed the letter to Trump, has received funding from Koch-affiliated groups and is a :{partner organization:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: in the Charles Koch Institute’s Liberty@Work program.

Along with significant funding from the Charles Koch Foundation, Strata Policy has received donations from the Institute for Energy Research, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that is also funded in part by the Kochs and their affiliated organizations. Simmons’ son, Daniel Simmons, previously worked at the Koch-funded Institute for Energy Research as vice president for policy.

Daniel Simmons now serves in Trump’s Department of Energy as acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy. Prior to joining DOE, the younger Simmons:{also held a top position:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: at the Koch-funded American Energy Alliance, which :{advocated:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: for the office he now oversees at DOE to be eliminated.

Josh Israel contributed to this piece.

#CLIMATE, #KOCH BROTHERS, #RENEWABLE ENERGY, #SOLAR POWER

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/spreading-the-free-market-gospel/413239/

see below

www.nytimes.com › 2018/05/05 › koch-donors-george-mason

What Charles Koch and Other Donors to George Mason ...

May 5, 2018 - George Mason University recently released documents that raised questions ... from conservative-leaning donors like the Charles Koch Foundation had ... key economics appointments at the Mercatus Center, a Koch-funded think tank ... of a similar agreement at Florida State University that permitted a Koch ...

www.insidehighered.com › news › 2018/05/01 › koch-agreements-ge...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/revisiting-citizens-united-justice-anthony-kennedy-is-the-author-of-one-of-the-most-controversial-and-scorned-rulings-in-modern-court-history

fsu prof on campus free sp?

Professor Michael T. Morley speaking at the 2018 Annual Florida Chapters Conference #

fsu.campuslabs.com › engage › organization › documents › view

The Federalist Society - Campus Labs

:{:(style="border-color:#3c4043;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{DOC:(style="cursor:auto;border:#ebebeb;;border-radius:2px;display:inline-block;height:14px;letter-spacing:0.75px;padding:0px 4px;text-align:center;margin:0px 2px 3px;vertical-align:middle"):}:

:{Article I—Organization Name. The name of this organization shall be The :{Federalist Society:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of :{Florida State University:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: College of :{Law:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

fsu.campuslabs.com › engage › organization › federalistsocietyforlaw...

Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies - Nole ...

:{:(style="border-color:#3c4043;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{The :{Federalist Society:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: for :{Law:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and Public Policy Studies is a group of lawyers and :{law:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: students, primarily conservatives and libertarians, interested in the current :{state:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of the :{legal:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: order. ... This group is the :{Florida State:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: chapter of the :{Federalist Society:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

U niversity of Florida student body president facing possible impeachment over use of student fees for Trump Jr speaking event

At the University of Florida, Student Body President Michael Murphy…

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/don-jr-and-kimberly-guilfoyle-received-50000-for-university-of-florida-speaking-event-at-trump-campaign-officials-request-student-newspaper/

no lnx

Don Jr and Kimberly Guilfoyle received $50,000 for University of Florida speaking event at Trump campaign official’s request: Student newspaper

Written by Alex Henderson November 1, 2019

During an October 9, 2006 appearance on Larry King’s show on CNN — ten years before he was elected president of the United States — Donald Trump declared, “I like nepotism.” That is among the most honest things Trump has ever said; he likes nepotism a lot — so much that, according to the student newspaper at the University of Florida, his reelection campaign urged the student body to bring in his son, Donald Trump Jr., for a paid speech given on October 10.

Trump’s fondness for nepotism has been impossible to miss. His daughter, Ivanka Trump, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are both senior advisers in his administration — and Donald Trump Jr. is a prominent figure on his 2020 reelection campaign. And as affluent as Trump Jr. is, his father’s campaign was happy to help him earn thousands more, according to the University of Florida’s student newspaper, The Alligator.

Trump campaign official Caroline Wren, The Alligator reports, directly e-mailed the University of Florida’s student body president, Michael Murphy, in September and asked him to bring in Donald Trump Jr. to speak along with GOP operative Kimberly Guilfoyle (who previously co-hosted “The Five” on Fox News), and Republican National Committee (RNC) official Tommy Hicks. Although Guilfoyle has been very involved in Republican politics, she was once married to a prominent Democrat: California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

@radleybalko

Student newspaper finds evidence that the Trump campaign arranged for Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle to speak on the UF campus. Which means that Trump Jr. got $50K in mandatory student dues to come campaign for his dad.

https://twitter.com/AdamWeinstein/status/1189746365745770497?s=20 …

Adam Weinstein

@AdamWeinstein

“Emails show a Donald Trump re-election campaign official personally asked UF Student Body President Michael Murphy in September to bring Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle to campus the following month.”

Get yourself an indy school paper like UF’s https://www.alligator.org/news/emails-released-between-student-body-president-and-donald-trump-campaign/article_7dad41f0-fb7a-11e9-9b4f-3795b8d7df23.html …

@AdamWeinstein

“Emails show a Donald Trump re-election campaign official personally asked UF Student Body President Michael Murphy in September to bring Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle to campus the following month.”

Emails released between Student Body President and Donald Trump campaign official

Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle spoke at UF on Oct. 10

alligator.org

Brad Po-sometimes-scum-BOO??

@brad_polumbo

I feel like Don Jr. isn't the best guy to make the case against nepotism... https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1189896064486252546 …

The Hill

@thehill

"I wish my name was Hunter Biden. I could go abroad, make millions off my father’s presidency. I’d be a really rich guy." http://hill.cm/gndFg4I

6:25 AM - Oct 31, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Brad Po-sometimes-scum-BOO??'s other Tweets

The $50,000 payment for Trump Jr., Guilfoyle and Hicks (described by The Alligator as a “joint payment”) for the October 10 event was funded by student tuition.

In a September 10 e-mail, according to The Alligator, Wren told Murphy, “We met at my house on the 4th of July. I wanted to follow up with you regarding a speaking engagement at the University of Florida for Donald Trump Jr.” And on September 11, Murphy responded and said he would to “love to hop on a phone call” to discuss bringing Trump Jr., Guilfoyle and Hicks to the campus.

Wren told The Alligator that, in her e-mails to the University of Florida, she used a Trump campaign-related e-mail signature by accident and that she was communicating “via my private e-mail in my personal capacity and mistakenly forgot to remove my Trump Victory signature.”

koch-head?

https://www.ecowatch.com/hurricane-michael-recovery-efforts-2640912689.html

Hurricane Michael Recovery Efforts Point to the Power of Local Generosity After Overlooked Disasters

The ConversationOct. 10, 2019 11:56AM ESTINSIGHTS + OPINION

By David Berlan

Academia: The 'Intellectual Raw Materials' for the EV Fight

The Koch network has spent decades investing in colleges and universities, often times funding faculty positions or free market centers and programs and staffing them with ideologically aligned academics. In recent years, this funding has come under considerable scrutiny, and much has been reported on the strings attached to funding of programs like the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, and the Department of Economics at Florida State University.

By design, this is an “investment in the intellectual raw materials,” as Fink wrote, “that is, the exploration and production of abstract concepts and theories.”

The abstract nature of such academic exploration makes it a little harder to see the impact of the Koch network’s investments in universities on a single policy issue as discreet as transportation electrification. But not impossible.

...

Indeed, some of the Kochs' chosen academics and Koch-funded centers have spoken publicly to the issue.

One of the most visible academic figures arguing against the federal EV tax credit is Veronique de Rugy, a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center. Last fall, as Congress considered a couple of opposing bills — a bipartisan proposal to extend the tax credit and another to cancel it — de Rugy railed against the tax credit in an op-ed.

It’s worth noting that the bill to eliminate the credit was introduced by Senator John:{ Barrasso:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: of Wyoming, the third largest recipient of Koch Industries donations in the Senate, and that Koch Industries formally lobbied for Barrasso’s bill. De Rugy wrote that “Barrasso's proposal makes the tax code simpler and less distortionary, making it the most economically sound.”

Earlier this year, de Rugy wrote another op-ed bashing the bipartisan support for the federal EV tax credit, and describing the consumer tax incentive as a “corporate handout.”

Another Mercatus Center economist, Matthew Mitchell, publishes frequently on the subjects of government favoritism and privilege, making the popular free-market argument that the government shouldn’t support private industries through fiscal policies like tax preferences, loan guarantees, and direct subsidization.

Curiously, Mitchell never writes of the massive subsidies enjoyed by the mature oil and gas industries, which the U.S. treasury has calculated out to $4.7 billion per year. Nor does he take issue with the more than $500 million that Koch Industries itself — the second largest private company in the U.S. — has benefited from over the past two decades, according to the Subsidy Tracker built by Good Jobs First. Mitchell does, however, use Tesla as a “beautiful illustration of the problem of favoritism and crony capitalism” in a video he narrates for the Federalist Society, and in a number of related articles.

It’s more common for Koch-funded academics to influence the EV policy discussion indirectly, through the “abstract concepts and theories” that Fink described or through other related issues.

The gasoline tax provides a good example. The Koch network opposes any increase to federal or state gas taxes, for obvious reasons — the taxes would make Koch Industries’ refined petroleum products more expensive (and make alternatives like mass transit and electric cars more attractive). However, gas taxes typically fund roads, and gas tax revenues are dwindling as they haven’t kept pace with inflation and cars have gotten far more fuel efficient.

[omg pix:

Koch Student Commons, on the ground floor of the University of Kansas' business school. ]

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.

Think Tanks: Translating Free Market Ideas to EV Antagonism

Fink described the role of think tanks as translating ideas into actual solutions and policy proposals. Here, at this stage, “ideas are applied to a relevant context and molded into needed solutions for real-world problems.”

The role that think tanks and policy institutions play in fighting against EV-friendly policies cannot be overstated, as they develop and push deceptive talking points about electric cars into the public policy debates, and even produce reports and “studies” that cherry-pick data to promote a burn-more-gas agenda.

As Elliot Negin of the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote, “these think tanks and advocacy groups essentially function as public relations arms for their benefactors, representing their interests under the guise of being neutral, albeit conservative, policy shops.”

Negin references a September 2018 letter, which DeSmog also reported extensively on, that reveals the breadth of the Koch think tank influence in the debate over the federal EV tax credit. The letter, signed by 30 self-described “conservative free-market organizations” — the majority of which have clear ties to Charles Koch and Koch Industries through their funding or leadership — called for Congress to halt the expansion of the EV tax credit, or to eliminate it entirely.

If there is a central hub of the Koch network’s think tank efforts, it appears to be the American Energy Alliance (AEA), which organized the letter to Congress.

The AEA is the advocacy wing of the Institute for Energy Research, both of which receive Koch funding. Both groups are lead by Tom Pyle, who has a long history of working with and for the Koch brothers and Koch Industries. He was the top lobbyist at Koch Industries, and then later as a private lobbyist, he lobbied on behalf of Koch Industries and the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (now theAmerican Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers), of which Koch Industries is a core and influential member.

The AEA has been consistently vocal in its opposition to the electric vehicle tax credit, and in June released a now-annual deceptive push poll that relied on demonstrably false data and leading questions to allege that Americans don't support the tax credit.

Joining Pyle in signing the letter were representatives of another 29 organizations, at least 17 of which have clear, demonstrable ties to the Koch network.

There's the “Action” arm of the Koch-funded corporate bill mill the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative advocacy group dedicated to “economic freedom” that has received funding from ExxonMobil, Texaco, and the family foundations of both Koch brothers.

Then there's American Commitment, run by Phil Kerpen, a former vice president of Americans for Prosperity (founded and funded by the Kochs). And don't forget Less Government, an “organization dedicated to reducing the power of government and protecting the First Amendment from governmental assault,” founded and run by Seton Motley, staunch Koch defender, who is also a policy adviser to the climate science-denying Heartland Institute, which has received millions in grants from Koch family network foundations.

And there's Frontiers of Freedom, run by George Landrith, a group which has received significant funding from Koch network foundations and dark money organizations like DonorsTrust, and which launched an offshoot calledthe Energy Equality Coalition to battle against the federal electric vehicle tax credit.

Besides collaborating on the occasional letter to Congress, representatives from these groups regularly reach out into the public sphere to influence public opinion and bend political will.

When the Energy Equality Coalition launched, one of the group's board members, George Landrith, told The Weekly Standard, “Working-class people are paying taxes to subsidize luxury goods for the richest among us … We believe there should be energy equality, not special treatment for the wealthy.” Landrith’s comment anticipated a talking point that would become a favorite of the Koch network, one that has been repeated dozens, if not hundreds, of times in op-eds and commentaries penned by Koch reps.

Over a two-month span after Senator Barrasso introduced his bill to eliminate the EV tax credit last fall, a flurry of such pieces hit the presses. In December 2018, Jonathan Lesser of the Manhattan Institute (which has received more than $2.6 million from Koch foundations) tried to paint the EV tax credit as “inequitable” in Investors Business Daily.

A couple days later, Landrith argued the same in:{ The Daily Caller:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:. Then came Ross Marchand of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance(at least $1.1 million from Koch groups), bashing the “EV tax credit gravy train,” and Drew Johnson of the National Center for Public Policy Research(at least $1 million from DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund) asking readers of the Austin American Statesmen to “Imagine taxing middle-class families to help rich folks buy luxury cars.”

This echo chamber has proven effective.In February 2019, Senator Barrasso himself wrote in a FoxNews op-ed that “Every time one of these cars sells, the U.S. taxpayer must help pay for it,” and also stated inaccurately that “Eight out of 10 electric-car tax credits go to households earning at least $100,000 — buyers who don’t need a subsidy.” Speaking in the Senate, Barrasso repeated that the EV program “disproportionately subsidizes wealthy buyers” and that “hard-working Wyoming taxpayers shouldn't have to subsidize wealthy California luxury-car buyers.”

It’s worth noting that this particular talking point is intentionally misleading — leaving out the huge contribution of electric car leases — and is easily debunked. (See our explanation on KochvsClean here, and check out the rest of our EV Facts while you’re there.)

So, where does it come from? That brings us to the other main purpose of the Kochs’ investments in think tanks: producing the raw materials for the disinformation that gets pumped through the conservative echo chamber.

The “eight of out 10” statistic that has been repeated ad nauseum is typically attributed to a report by Wayne Winegarden of the Pacific Research Institute (which has received $1.7 million from Koch foundations). It has been roundly debunked for cherrypicking outdated statistics and ignoring leased vehicles, which play a significant role in the EV market.

Yet the study has been cited in countless articles and op-eds, including those described above and others published in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Examiner, the National Review, and more, as well as inletters to Congressional leaders, including the one described above. Clearly, the Koch network’s investments in the Pacific Research Institute are paying off.

The institute's product is one of a handful of reports and studies that Koch network commentators will regularly cite in their attacks on electric cars. Another comes from the Manhattan Institute, supporting the obviously misleading claims that widespread adoption of electric cars would increase air pollution and have a negligible impact on the global climate. Another, by NERA Economic Consulting, was commissioned by a subsidiary of Koch Industries and is often referenced to support macroeconomic arguments against lifting the EV tax credit's cap.

To review: The Koch network’s massive investment in think tanks and policy institutions not only funds the production of deceptive talking points, but also the voices from seemingly reputable organizations who pump the disinformation through the echo chamber and influence public opinion and shape political will.

The Ground Game: Citizen Activist Organizations and Front Groups

In his magazine article, “Structure of Social Change,” Fink wrote that “Citizen activist or implementation groups are needed in the final stage to take the policy ideas from the think tanks and translate them into proposals that citizens can understand and act upon.”

To this end, the Kochs’ sprawling 501(c)4 advocacy group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a massively influential player, with more than 2.3 million members and operations in 35 states. The national AFP team operates publicly much like the think tanks described above — see, for instance, this op-ed on why “Tesla drivers don’t need taxpayer handouts” by an AFP policy analyst, or the chief government affairs officer’s signature on the EV tax credit letter.

[marco conf]

But at the state level and local level, AFP chapters work more directly to rally voters and pressure elected and appointed policymakers.

As a number of states consider policies and regulations concerning electric vehicles, AFP’s influence is growing. They are even intervening in arcane electric utility regulatory proceedings. As Politico recently reported, AFP’s state chapters have mobilized against utility investments in EV charging infrastructure in Arizona, Illinois, and Iowa.

Various AFP state chapters have also pushed legislators to pass annual EV registration fees, many inspired by a model resolution discussed for years at the Koch-funded and -controlled ALEC meetings. The model resolution that passed at last fall’s ALEC meeting was written and promoted by none other than Tom Pyle of the American Energy Alliance, as revealed in emails obtained by the corporate watchdog Documented, providing yet another example of how the policy influence flows through this multi-tiered Koch network.

In Colorado in 2017, AFP’s state chapter lobbied aggresively for a billthat would end the state’s tax incentive for the purchase of a new electric car. The effort paid off, as the state legislature canceled the tax credit. (Though the victory was short-lived, as the Democrats swept the statewide offices in the 2018 elections and quickly introduced a new tax incentive.)

Colorado, a recent hotbed of EV policy action, hosts more Koch-tied ground game groups than just AFP.

Earlier this year, a group called the Freedom to Drive Coalition launched, using the Koch’s disinformation playbook to oppose efforts by the governor’s office to introduce cleaner air standards and adopt low- and zero-emission vehicle mandates.

As DeSmog reported this summer, the coalition portrays itself as the voice of the Colorado driver, but is run by a handful of Colorado-based public affairs professionals. One of them is Sean Paige, a former director of Americans for Prosperity’s Colorado chapter. The coalition itself includes car dealers and auto groups, some agricultural associations, and the Colorado Petroleum Association.

Notably, the only national member is the American Fuel & Petrochemicals Manufacturers (AFPM), a national trade association representing 98 percent of oil refining capacity in the United States, in which Koch Industries is an influential member. (James Mahoney served as AFPM chairman while he was an executive vice president at Koch Industries, and there has been a perpetual revolving door between the leadership and staff at AFPM, Koch Industries, ALEC, and the Institute for Energy Research.)

Similar efforts are evident on the ground in states across the country, wherever policymakers are considering proposals to help accelerate the transition to electric cars. Other efforts are less evident, but almost certainly underway.

The Koch ground game often runs campaigns through front groups that mask the Big Oil money and present a facade of public and consumer support. (Recall that Americans for Prosperity was once itself a little known political advocacy group masquerading as a decentralized grassroots libertarian movement that helped juice the early Tea Party upwelling.)

The Koch network and Marathon Petroleum were already revealed in a New York Times investigation to be behind a covert effort to bundle public comments in support of a rollback of President Obama's clean car standards, which the Trump administration is on the verge of formalizing. If that roll back survives certain legal challenges — which most legal experts doubt — it would force American drivers to burn an extra 500,000 barrels of gasoline every day, and would disincentivize automakers from producing and selling all-electric models that are currently in development.

While the Koch network's fingerprints on that effort were exposed, there are almost certainly more front groups that haven't yet been tied to Koch funding or coordination.

All told, the Koch network's investments throughout their “structure of social change” give politicians plenty of cover, through disinformation and the veneer of public support, to promote policies that put the brakes on the market for electric vehicles.

Then factor in the considerable cash invested directly in political campaigns by Koch Industries and its subsidiaries, and the dark money that flows from Koch-affiliated PACs, and the campaign-caliber ground game provided before elections by Americans for Prosperity, and the startling volume of voter data they've compiled in their i360 voter files.

That's how you get policymakers to spurn electric cars, instead supporting policies that only benefit the oil industry, at the expense of public health, the climate, and the personal finances of American drivers.

===

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.

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; ceriricate 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

EPA SAB off bs

Stuart, Amy University of South Florida Amy L. Stuart, Ph.D. is a Professor at the University of South Florida (USF) in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, College of Public Health. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and courtesy appointments in the Center for Urban Transportation Research, and the Patel College of Global Sustainability. She is also the List of Candidates with Biosketches for 2017 SAB Annual Membership 60 founder and director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Environmental Health at USF. Dr. Stuart earned a BS in chemical engineering, a MS in civil engineering, and a PhD in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford University. She completed postdoctoral training at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. Dr. Stuart leads and collaborates on multi-disciplinary research and teaching initiatives related to air pollution, public health, and environmental sustainability. Her research has contributed to understanding the impacts of urban design and transportation on air pollution exposure equity, the fate of volatile chemicals during cloud freezing, mercury contamination and exposures, and associations between air pollution and birth defects, resulting in over 100 scholarly publications. During the last two years, Dr. Stuart’s work has been funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and by the United States Department of Transportation. She is also a previous recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award. Dr. Stuart is professionally involved in the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors, currently serving on the Lectures Committee. She is a member of the Air and Waste Management Association, including previous service as the Chair of the Student Awards Committee of the Higher Education Council, and is a member of the International Society of Exposure Sciences. She regularly serves as a reviewer of manuscripts for several scientific journals and of proposals for grant sponsors on air pollution topics

Climate Science Denial on Koch-Funded Campuses

Of primary concern to Greenpeace is evidence of professors in Koch-funded university departments denying the science of climate change. Some universities that are threatened to be staffed or controlled by known financiers of climate “skepticism” or play roles in Koch’s political campaigns against climate policies.

FSU – Climate Denial Econ 101

Professor James Gwartney at Florida State University co-authored a textbook called Economics: Private and Public Choice. This “widely used” textbook has been criticized for six years straight by Ph.D economist Yoram Bauman for misrepresenting the science of climate change – a field well outside of the authors’ credentialed experience. Since 2010, when Dr. Bauman began ranking economics textbooks that include climate change back, Gwartney et al. have not only ranked dead-last every time, but have made little progress in updating the inaccurate and false assertions made in their widely-used textbook.

Three authors of Economics: Private and Public Choice have overlapping connections to Koch-funded universities and political groups.

James Gwartney works in the Koch-funded Florida State University economics department, and is on the Research Advisory Council of the Koch-funded James Madison Institute, itself a member of the Koch-funded [State Policy Network](http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/state-policy-network-spn/?utma=1.834972712.1309880319.1345146585.1345148660.342&utmb=1.1.10.1345148660&utmc=1&utmx=-&utmz=1.1345137232.339.249.utmcsr=google|utmccn=%28organic%29|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=%28not%20provided%29&utmv=-&__utmk=254992904). Gwartney is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, founded by Charles Koch and currently directed by David Koch and other close Koch associates. Gwartney received the Adam Smith award and Distinguished Scholar Award from the Association for Private Enterprise Education (APEE), which organizes professors at schools receiving Koch grants. Gwartney has served as president, vice president and executive board member of APEE. APEE itself receives money from Charles Koch. James Gwartney has authored at least 11 editions of “Economic Freedom of the World” for the Fraser Institute and the Cato Institute, a project funded by Koch. “Economic freedom” is written into the “Objectives” of Koch’s contract with Clemson University, as noted above.

Richard Stroup teaches at North Carolina State University, which helps the Charles Koch Institute place “summer fellows” into paid internships at Koch-funded political groups. Stroup is a director of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), itself founded by Charles Koch, and is a fellow at the Cato Institute, also founded by Charles Koch. Along with Charles Koch, Dr. Stroup is a member of the Mont PelerinSociety. Stroup authored “Free Market Environmentalism” for the anti-environmental Property and Environment Research Council (PERC), yet another organization financed by Koch foundations, which created a Free Market Environmentalism college course syllabus.

Russell Sobel now teaches at Citadel College Military College of South Carolina, after abruptly leaving West Virginia University in 2012, a top Koch-Funded school where Sobel was hand-chosen by the Charles Koch Foundation to direct the programs it funds. Sobel earned his economics Ph.D at FSU under Randy Holocombe. Sobel is a visiting fellow at the South Carolina Policy Council, part of the Koch-funded State Policy Network, and is affiliated with theMercatusCenter, the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, Tax Foundation, and Koch-funded hubs at Troy University in Alabama and Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Sobel served on the executive board of the Koch-funded consortium of professors, the Association of Private Enterprise Education, and received an award from APEE in 2007. Sobel has argued that mine safety regulations make coal miners less safe.

Ironically, the 2008 and 2013 contracts between Koch and FSU were signed by former president Eric Barron, a climate scientist who is now president of Penn State University, which has received $74,500 from Charles Koch since 2008.

...

“[I]f you intend to engage in press releases or other media outreach associated with programmatic activities, please notify us in advance,” Charles Koch Foundation officialsCharlie Ruger and Derek Johnsonwrote Peter Calcagno, director of the College of Charleston’s Center for Public Choice and Market Process. “We consider media outreach a collaborative effort and would appreciate the opportunity to both assist and advise.”

Donors are often sent unpublished press releases about programs they fund “as a courtesy so that they will know the contents,” school spokesman Mike Robertson said.

At Florida State University, one of the nation’s top educational recipients of Koch foundation money this decade — about $1.38 million from 2010 through 2013 — a similar request is more direct.

“FSU will allow [the Charles Koch Foundation] to review and approve the text of any proposed publicity which includes mention of CKF,” reads a memorandum of understanding signed between the university and foundation in 2013.

Such provisions aren’t new at Florida State University: the Center for Public Integrity last year reported that the Charles Koch Foundation first attempted in 2007 to place specific conditions on its financial support of the school, when it initially considered providing funding.

Among the proposed conditions: Teachings must align with the libertarian economic philosophy of Charles Koch, the Charles Koch Foundation would maintain partial control over faculty hiring and the chairman of the school’s economics department — a prominent economic theorist — must stay in place for another three years despite his plans to step down.

Florida State University ultimately didn’t agree to the initial requests when, in 2008, it reached a funding agreement with the foundation. It’s also tightened and clarified policies that affect private donors’ contributions to the university.

Relationships between certain school officials and the Charles Koch Foundation personnel nevertheless blossomed. One gatekeeper to Charles Koch’s riches practically became family — if not by blood, then money.

“Thought you might want to see our ‘nephew!’” wrote executive assistant Tonja Guilford to David Rasmussen, her boss and dean of Florida State University’s College of Social Sciences and Public Policy.

Attached to the October 2014 email were photos of this “nephew” — the tow-headed toddler son of John C. Hardin, director of university relations for the Charles Koch Foundation.

Hardin and his family had previously visited with Florida State University officials in Tallahassee. Talk of future get-togethers, and more pictures of Hardin’s son in a Superman costume, aloft in his father’s arms, would follow.

“I was just thinking this morning I needed new pictures to post outside my door,” Guilford fawned to Hardin in an email. “He is just way too cute in his superman costume. He’s my ‘little’ superman – I just love him!”

Friend-raising

Rasmussen, who routinely pursues private funding on behalf of his department, declined interview requests from the Center for Public Integrity, as did Guilford.

Florida State University spokesman Dennis Schnittker described the email exchanges as “friendly correspondence between individuals,” adding that collegial communications are a valuable part of school culture.

“Most university presidents would tell you before you can fundraise, you have to ‘friend raise,’” Schnittker said.

Today, the Kochs’ friendship with Florida State University appears stronger than ever.

An email written in September 2014 by Jesse Colvin, Florida State University’s College of Social Sciences and Public Policy development director, indicates the Charles Koch Foundation is committed to funding the work of economic department doctoral students “during 2015-2016 and in subsequent years.”

A series of other meetings and conversations between Hardin, from the Charles Koch Foundation, and Florida State University officials followed, documents indicate.

In November 2014, Florida State University officials huddled in the office of newly installed university President John Thrasher for a meeting entitled “Koch briefing.” Schnittker, the university spokesman, said the meeting was an “opportunity for our new president to be briefed by university staff about a gift agreement that obviously preceded his tenure.” Hardin of the Charles Koch Foundation was not present, Schnittker said.

Meanwhile, when officials at the Florida State University Project on Accountable Justice went hunting for funding, the Charles Koch Foundation factored into their strategy.

The Koch brothers, after all, were telegraphing their intent to make criminal justice reform a personal priority, reasoning that “overcriminalization,” like overregulation of industry, is resulting in more Americans enjoying fewer economic freedoms.

Not everyone at the Florida State University Project on Accountable Justice appeared thrilled at pursuing Koch cash.

“I know you really hate them, but we really need to send them some stuff,” then-Chairman Allison DeFoor wrote Executive Director Deborrah Brodsky late last year. “They have money. We don't.”

Reached separately by phone last week, DeFoor, an unabashed conservative, and Brodsky, a Canadian whose politics point more leftward, both laughed off the exchange as comedic banter between longtime colleagues.

But they confirmed they had pursued the Charles Koch Foundation. It hasn’t yet funded the project but did provide the organization “strategic support,” including co-hosting a forum on criminal justice.

DeFoor would conclude, following presentations in Washington, D.C., to both the Charles Koch Foundation and the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, that Koch interest in issues the project researches “is sincere, potentially aggressive and deep.”

As a small, three-year-old “research- and evidence-based” program, the Florida State UniversityProject on Accountable Justice will gladly take money from most anyone along the ideological spectrum who’s dedicated to its study of and work on criminal justice system reforms, Brodsky said. She counts liberal lions such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center and Human Rights Watch as partners.

The Charles Koch Foundation executives declined to be interviewed individually. Trice Jacobson, a foundation spokesperson, instead provided a statement that she said “captures what we all hope to share for this piece.”

“Like many charities, the Charles Koch Foundation recognizes the importance of supporting a diversity of ideas so scholars and students can continue to push the frontiers of knowledge and help people discover new and better ways to live fulfilling lives,” the statement read. “Our giving has expanded to support new research and programs on critical issues ranging from criminal justice reform to corporate welfare.”

In a separate statement of its “academic giving principles,” the Charles Koch Foundation asserts that it is “committed to advancing a marketplace of ideas and supporting a ‘Republic of Science’ where scholarship is free, open and subject to rigorous and honest intellectual challenge.”

It also notes that scholars and students “who are free to teach, learn, research, speak, critique and receive support for their work without interference” are in the “best position to discover the advances that will help improve well-being.”

Hazel Hall, home of the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies on the George Mason University Arlington campus. Wikimedia Commons...

see koch-ademia

http://www.alternet.org/human-rights/why-are-us-universities-arming-themselves-grenade-launchers

Sending an ominous signal to student protest movements nationwide,universities across the US are once again able to equip their police forces with castoff military gear, tying them ever more intimately into the military-industrial complex.

In August, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced at a Fraternal Order of Police convention that Program 1033 would resume providing ex-military equipment to police organizations, including university police departments.

Program 1033 has been running since the 1990s but was stopped two years ago by President Obama. Part of the program’s initial aim was for “use in drug enforcement by federal and state law enforcement.” As we well know, the “war on drugs” has been an abysmal failure.

As part of the program, already at least 117 colleges and universities received surplus-military gear. At least 117 places of higher education felt they needed military gear. At least 117 educational institutions are now armed and armored. This is the state of higher education in the US.

Jen Day Shaw, associate vice president and dean of students at the University of Florida, told The Chronicle of Higher Education, “For me, this is a cost savings for taxpayers.”

Meanwhile, Michael Qualls, an associate professor of criminal justice at Fort Valley State University, said, “If we continue on with the 1033 program, as those items become obsolete at the military level and if they become available, why not get ’em? It’s better to be prepared than not prepared.'” The flimsy — if paranoid — excuse for obtaining these items is boiled down to its purest essence: Why not?

What Universities Are Receiving

The list of items that are included in these transfers includes things as mundane as gauze — yes, gauze — and some standard pickup trucks. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee received mundane items, such as four adapter sockets, two key set socket heads and fours shelves for food service. No one, I would guess, has any problem with a university owning these items.

At the other end of the spectrum are armored vehicles. As part of the program, throughout the US, in total nine armored vehicles were exchanged — some being armored pickup trucks, and others being “Mine Resistant Vehicles.” MRAPS, as they’re known, were originally designed to withstand improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan. The University of Florida was one of the recipients of an armored truck.

Across the country, numerous universities also received guns and ammunition. These include small arms (pistols) and rifles (M-14), as well as assault rifles (M-16). And two universities — Hinds Community College andUniversity of Central Florida— obtained grenade launchers. For scale, the 2014 report states that 930 guns were provided in total to 87 different universities.

This supply of military gear is part of the process of universities throughout the US taking on various policing roles outside of their buildings. At many universities, these roles addressed issues that fell under the label “public safety” — often mostly about alcohol. In the past 20 or 30 years, universities have begun having increasingly active, working police forces dedicated solely to policing the life and boundaries of the university. It is these organizations that are receiving these weapons and vehicles.

Concerns about this supply of military gear is exacerbated by the reality that many campus police organizations are privatized, leading to less oversight and accountability in many cases. A 2014 Vice article laid out the difficulties faced regarding the University of Chicago Police force, which is privatized, and the fact that these private police forces often have “the legal status of a private police force and the powers of a public one.” How these privatized police forces are themselves policed is a critical question that is still, in many ways, unanswered.

Reinstituting Program 1033

The assertion that this is about fiscal responsibility seeks to waylay the reality that arming police on campuses has a dramatic impact on the campus community, and an even greater impact on the engagement with communities outside of the student body. The increased policing in all communities is worrying. When on campus, this increased policing acts as a deterrent to student resistance, and as an obstacle between dialogue within and outside of the university communities.All of this is crucial, as President Trump and Jeff Sessions, making good on a campaign promise, stated that they would be resuming the transfer of weapons to police departments across the country. Jeff Sessions said, “We will not put superficial concerns above public safety…. The executive order the president will sign today will ensure that you can get the lifesaving gear that you need to do your job and send a strong message that we will not allow criminal activity, violence and lawlessness to become the new normal. And we will save taxpayer money in the meantime.”

All of this is part of a broader pattern of police enforcement, and is simultaneously connected to unemployment. At this juncture in history, the system is producing not simply excess workers, as capitalism almost always has, but completely expendable workers to a degree that it never has before. And in the US, we are asking many of these expendable workers to pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend university. The average student who graduated in 2016 is left with $37,172 in student loan debt.

It should not be surprising that the majority of the military gear requisitions went to states with the highest poverty rate. High levels of poverty with increases in military-grade equipment is a recipe for disaster. These weapons are not only designed to keep students in line, they also perpetuate a racial and class divide between campus and community. This is especially true for urban campuses, where brand new multimillion-dollar buildings sit comfortably just inside the invisible walls of campus, while run-down houses and apartments sit precariously just outside. This invisible wall is where many of these police acquisitions will be utilized, as the wall is the most common route for squad cars on many campuses.

University Campuses as Police Zones

The US public should be outraged that colleges are undertaking a militarization of their campuses and that higher education administrators are actively supporting this process. Administrators are actively engaged in violently assaulting and bludgeoning our 17-22-year-olds, demonstrating to them the force of the state. Henry Giroux has written previously about these changes in higher education in his prescient book “University in Chains: Confronting the Military-industrial-academic Complex.” The continued supplying of weapons to universities now moves the connections between higher education and the military industrial complex even closer.

Academia is now becoming an even more direct part of the violent controlling arm of the neoliberal state apparatus by enmeshing itself in the military-industrial complex. Nowhere is this more clear than in the continuation of Program 1033, where “money savings” is used as a way of introducing the military to campus, and where administrators oversee the elaboration of a system whereby dissent is quelled by a show of direct force. For what else is an armored vehicle besides a show of force? Bringing the military to campus is providing students an education in living in a police state, and giving them a front-row seat in the classroom of neoliberal politics in the 21st century.

florida atlantic university Allen West , James Madison Inst?

legit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Atlantic_University

A Southern focus

Why would so much of Charles Koch's contributions to higher education be going to schools in the South?

The Charles Koch Foundation did not respond to requests for comment. But Ralph Wilson, a doctoral candidate at Florida State University who co-founded the student activist group FSU Progress Coalition and is active with UnKoch My Campus, a student group dedicated to uncovering the Kochs' influence on U.S. universities, thinks the Southern focus has to do with the brothers' political clout in the conservative region.

Koch Industries has contributed heavily to candidates for state office in the South, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Since 1994, the company, its political action committee, and its lobbying arm have invested the most money in state candidates, other political action committees, and outside political groups in Texas ($1.5 million), with Virginia in third ($670,000), Georgia in fifth ($275,000), and Florida in seventh ($200,000).

State politicians in turn are often in charge of appointing public university systems' boards of governors and trustees who appoint top administrators, who then can influence the creation of academic centers, the donations a school accepts, and hiring decisions. Some politicians even become top university officers themselves.

Take for example Florida State, where a contentious search for the university president took place last year. One candidate for the job was businessman John Thrasher, then a Republican state senator in Florida and chair of the re-election campaign of Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who received significant support from the Kochs. Thrasher's own campaign got $3,000 from Koch Industries over three election cycles, and in 1998 he was named legislator of the year by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-business advocacy group that receives funding from Koch foundations.

Thrasher, who twice violated ethics laws as a state representative and voted to cut Florida's higher education budget, was up against three candidates who many thought were better qualified for the university presidency. But the Scott-appointed chair of the school's board of trustees picked the presidential selection committee, which included many politicians, former politicians and lobbyists. Thrasher was chosen as president.

In 2008, Florida State had entered into a $1.5 million funding deal with the Charles Koch Foundation that granted the foundation wide leverage in hiring decisions and imposed other requirements. Public outcry led to a revised agreement, which drew fire from students, faculty, and alumni for infringing upon academic freedom.

In Thrasher's final months in the Florida House, he supported a bill that weakened donor transparency requirements for state universities. And after Thrasher became FSU's president, the school removed the requirement for a formal gift agreement — a written document"outlining the program to be supported and the schedule of contributions" — for donations over $25,000.

"Thrasher, as a legislator and now as president, has enabled FSU's resistance to donor transparency," says Wilson. "He has personally perpetuated the university's misinformation about the Koch agreements as justification for refusing to meet with students and faculty, and maintained total silence regarding recent student and faculty concerns over the university's donor policy."

A free-market strategy

Some faculty members at Florida State University say their school has sold out to a conservative group that dangled a big donation.

Recently released details show the university gave the Charles Koch Foundation a role in hiring decisions, in exchange for a big grant.

Three years ago, the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation struck an agreement with Florida State to encourage the study of economic institutions and political economy.

The foundation, known for its links to conservative causes, gave the university $1.5 million to fund two faculty positions. David Rasmussen, dean of FSU's College of Social Sciences, says his school maintained control over who would teach, and what they taught.

"There was never an acid test that said this person who we hire must think this kind of thing," he says.

But the grant created a special advisory board, chosen by the Koch Foundation, that has a role in choosing faculty. And that decision is leading to a world of controversy for the university.

FSU professors have assaulted the idea of giving donors any voice in choosing professors. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, says for years, corporations have been endowing chairs and splashing their names all over the ivory tower. As examples, he cites "The Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of Hotel and Restaurant Administration in Washington. The Lego Professor Learning and Research and the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT."

But Nelson says even those arrangements never gave donors a place in hiring decisions ordinarily reserved for faculty.

Nelson also teaches at the University of Illinois and says his school once considered giving a similar role to a donor. "When details were released the faculty Senate rose up in arms and the agreement was canceled," he says.

The trouble with Florida State, Nelson says, is that faculty members did not vote on the Koch proposal.

Rasmussen describes the Koch Foundation more as a collaborator than as a master. Faculty, he insists, is always in control.

"The economics department says, here are the two people we really like, goes to the advisory board and says, will you approve these two people? They said yes, and then they funded the positions," Rasmussen says.

Whether or not this arrangement crossed a line, schools flirt with that boundary all the time, especially when they hook up with foundations with a definite point of view.

The BB&T Charitable Foundation has endowed about 60 universities with grants to explore, in its words, the "moral foundations of capitalism."

John Allison, the former head of financial giant BB&T Corp., now helps the foundation find universities that are open to discussing the benefits of the free enterprise system. Foundation agreements often include the expectation that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged will be taught.

"The universities know that we like to have Atlas Shrugged included in the course on the moral foundations of capitalism," he says. "Typically there are other books included; often Karl Marx is included. We think it's very important for students to hear both points of view."

Allison says the BB&T Foundation never has a say in hiring decisions. In fact, he says, the schools he works with already have faculty members who share the foundation's goals and just want financial support to expand that work. Allison says he is trying to spread ideas that he feels are pushed to the sidelines at most schools.

"They're way minority ideas," he says. "Because most universities are dominated by liberal professors."

Florida State also gets BB&T money. Rasmussen says that at a time of dwindling state support, students are the net winners from these deals.

"Because of the BB&T and Koch Foundation gifts, we've got three great teachers who are teaching about 1,000 students a semester," he says.

Most of the money given to universities is restricted in some way. So despite the criticism, foundations and corporations will continue to press for a platform in academia.

am inst of chemists

Editor-in-Chief

David Devraj Kumar	Florida Atlantic University, USA

Editorial Assistant

Deborah Cate	Manuta Chemical Consulting

Art & Web Direction

Alberto Fernández	Florida Atlantic University, USA

Editorial Review Board

John E. E. Baglin	IBM Almaden Research Center, USA
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Xiongwei Cai	Biogen Idec, USA
Donna Chamely-Wiik	Florida Atlantic University, USA
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Lawrence Duffy	University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA
Nwadiuto Esiobu	Florida Atlantic University, USA

Charles Koch's Assault on Academic Freedom

—By Andy Kroll

| Tue May. 10, 2011 6:57 AM PDT

John Murray

Billionaire Charles Koch, one half of the hugely influential Koch brothers duo and the CEO of Koch Industries, has splashed tens of millions of dollars to promote his freemarket, libertarian ideology. His charity has funded freemarket think tanks around the country, from the powerful Cato Institute in Washington. DC to state-level outfits pushing privatization and deregulation. Now, Koch is taking heat for a more controversial ploy: leveraging a donation to a major university in order to handpick college professors that agree with his worldview.

Koch's charity, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, pledged $1.5 million to Florida State University to fund new hires in the economics department. But as the *St. Petersburg Times* reported, this was hardly a no-strings-attached gift. Koch representatives had considerable control over the hiring process:

Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they've funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.

Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it's not happy with the faculty's choice or if the hires don't meet "objectives" set by Koch during annual evaluations.

David W. Rasmussen, dean of the College of Social Sciences, defended the deal, initiated by an FSU graduate working for Koch. During the first round of hiring in 2009, Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty's suggestions but ultimately agreed on two candidates. Although the deal was signed in 2008 with little public controversy, the issue revived last week when two FSU professors—one retired, one active—criticized the contract in the Tallahassee Democrat as an affront to academic freedom.

Rasmussen said hiring the two new assistant professors allows him to offer eight additional courses a year. "I'm sure some faculty will say this is not exactly consistent with their view of academic freedom,'' he said. "But it seems to me it would have been irresponsible not to do it."

kos: A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free enterprise."

The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it's not happy with the faculty's choice or if the hires don't meet "objectives" set by Koch during annual evaluations.

During the first round of hiring in 2009, Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty's suggestions but ultimately agreed on two candidates.

Yale University once returned $20 million when the donor demanded veto power over appointments, saying such control was "unheard of."

Jennifer Washburn, who has reviewed dozens of contracts between universities and donors, called the Koch agreement with FSU "truly shocking."

http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/billionaires-role-in-hiring-decisions-at-florida-state-university-raises/1168680

INFLUENCING THE NEXT GENERATION

The Kochs have been involved in influencing higher education for more than 30 years, beginning with what is now called the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies, both based at George Mason University in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Between 2007 and 2011, the Kochs gave **$30.5 million to 221 universities**through their charitable foundations. More than half of that giving, roughly $16 million, has gone to George Mason University and its foundation. Recently, however, the Koch brothers’ influence has expanded outside Northern Virginia and created potential conflicts of interest for the universities accepting their donations.

The May-June 2012 issue of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors, focused on corporate influence in higher education. Kent Miller and Ray Bellamy wrote about the Koch influence in the Florida State University economics department. The Charles G. Koch Foundation offered to give the university $1.5 million to hire two assistant professors and fund fellowships and undergraduate curriculum on free-enterprise topics. The foundation appointed an advisory board that would award money to faculty and make sure that the work they completed fit with the foundation’s mission. Miller and Bellamy wrote, “In exchange for his ‘gift,’ the donor got to assign specific readings, select speakers brought to campus and instruct them with regard to the focus of their lectures, shape the curriculum with new courses and specify the number of students in the courses, name the program’s director, and initiate a student club.”

It’s not just at Florida State, which was a high-profile case, but also at other universities where the Kochs and John Allison, retired chairman and CEO of the financial institution BB&T, have donated money. Allison is on the board of directors at the Mercatus Center, which is funded by the Kochs, and following an intense fight in which the Kochs backed him, is now the president of the Cato Institute. BB&T sponsors chaired professors, typically in economics departments, and the universities where they sponsor a chaired professor often line up with where the Kochs donate.

An Investigative Reporting Workshop analysis found that the Kochs had donated to 10 universities where there were BB&T-chaired professors, including West Virginia University, Clemson University and smaller universities, such as Hampden-Sydney College and Barton College. According to Inside Higher Ed in 2011, Clemson “spent several years cultivating the Charles G. Koch Foundation to support its Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, and has received $1 million thus far.”

At the core of the Kochs’ philosophy are the works of Ayn Rand, the objectivist philosopher and author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” (Rand’s writings are also emblematic of the readings recommended to students by the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University). The new course that the Charles G. Koch Foundation wanted approved at Florida State was called “Market Ethics: The Vices, Virtues, and Values of Capitalism,” featuring the work of Rand as required by the memorandum of understanding. Through their charitable foundations, the Kochs gave $100,000 to the Ayn Rand Institute from 2009 to 2011.

And in the interest of full disclosure, in the course of this investigation, we discovered that American University, where the Investigative Reporting Workshop is based (within the School of Communication), received $17,500 in two separate grants from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. The university’s Office of Special Programs (OSP) reports that both grants are for a program called “Lectures in Classical Liberalism,” which is under the direction of Tom Merrill and Alan Levine. Both professors are in the School of Public Affairs.

OSP said the following language describes the program that the grants supported:

“We seek to build on and expand the program of lectures in classical liberalism funded by the Koch Foundation to date. At least two of these lectures would be designated “Koch Lectures on Classical Liberalism”; all of the funded lectures, however, will discuss some aspect of classical liberalism whether in its theoretical and historical roots or in its contemporary applications. This series of lectures is primarily designed to encourage our students to have a sustained engagement with the ideas of classical liberalism, and secondarily at presenting an opportunity for classical liberal ideas to be heard in the larger university community and the D.C. policy conversation. To that end, we also require our speakers to meet and take questions from our students in an informal session separate from the public lecture, either in one of our classes or in a breakfast or lunch session during the speaker’s campus visit.”

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4. Make it a 5-year agreement, not an endowment.

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INFLUENCING THE NEXT GENERATION