Notions of academic independence gained a fresh twist recently, when the new Freedom Center found a home on the UA campus.
The center’s website (www.arizonafreedomcenter.org) opens with a two-lane blacktop meandering into the windswept horizon. It’s the quintessential icon of American freedom, beckoning us toward distant hills.
But at the end of that road, you won’t find Easy Rider. What you will find is money from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.
Along with his brother David, Charles Koch is part of the billionaire energy-business dynasty that has poured millions of dollars into ultra-conservative causes. Favorite Koch beneficiaries include the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which is linked to the creation of the Tea Party movement.
Administratively, the UA Freedom Center is tucked within the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and soon will enjoy its own digs at the Marshall Building on Park Avenue. The think tank already features an impressive roster of UA faculty members, including at least two endowed Philosophy Department instructors.
It’s the brainchild of David Schmidtz, a 15-year Philosophy Department veteran and a star among libertarian intellectuals. According to a Social and Behavioral Sciences publication called SBS Developments, the center grew out of classes Schmidtz has long taught on the “philosophy of freedom.”
To critics on the left, however, that terminology has become conservative code for libertarian, anti-regulation ideology.
The center was seeded with donations and pledges of more than $2.5 million from Ken Kendrick and his wife, Randy. Mr. Kendrick was a co-founder of the software company Datatel, and is currently managing general partner of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Schmidtz met the Kendricks when he was being honored with an award from Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University in Arlington, Va.
As it happens, George Mason is also home to the Mercatus Center, which lists David Schmidtz among its faculty network. The Mercatus Center also boasts Charles Koch as a board member.
In 2010, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker published an exhausting study of the Koch brothers’ enormous network of political and academic patronage. That includes more than $30 million donated to George Mason University, with much of it earmarked for the Mercatus Center.
John Aloysius Farrell is a senior reporter with the Center for Public Integrity, a watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. In April, he published a long piece detailing how the Koch brothers use their millions to influence government policy.
“They give a tremendous amount of money to universities,” Farrell tells the Tucson Weekly. “A smaller segment of that, they spend on identifiable libertarian institutes or centers on campuses, including the two at George Mason University.”
The Mercatus Center bills itself as “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.” But it’s viewed far differently by detractors, who describe a think tank dedicated to stripping away government regulation of private industry. It takes particular aim at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has long been a thorn in the side of Koch Industries.
Have those same tendrils now reached the UA?
In an interview with the Weekly, Schmidtz characterizes the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation as a minor Freedom Center patron, having pledged a mere $1 million. But among the center’s other contributors is a major donor whose identity Schmitz says has been kept secret, even from him.
To learn more about this secret donor—and to find out about any other Koch donations to the school—we contacted Stephanie Balzer, communications director for the UA Foundation.
In an e-mail reply, Balzer sidestepped the question about other Koch donations on campus. She also would not identify the mysterious donor, writing that “we do not disclose any information about anonymous gifts to the University of Arizona Foundation.”
Chris Maloney heads the UA Philosophy Department. In the SBS Developments article, he called the new Freedom Center a “defining moment in the history of the department and the philosophical profession.” Maloney didn’t return a phone call from the Weekly seeking comment.
However, Schmidtz says the Koch brothers’ ties to the center are completely transparent. And he insists that they exert no influence over the research conducted there.
Instead, he says the center’s agenda is clear-cut. “If we were just putting our philosophical mission into one sentence, it would be to study freedom in all of its conceptions and also all of its forms—political freedom, economic freedom, civil rights and psychological freedom.”
The fruits of that mission could be far-reaching. Schmidtz says the center plans to offer a degree program in economic instruction for high school teachers, and to generate texts for K-12 education. “We aim not only to produce the teachers, but the materials that are getting taught.”
Some suggest that funding from the Koch brothers rarely comes without ideological strings attached. “They spread their cash around far and wide, targeting it at politicians or political parties or political groups,” says Dave Levinthal of the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. “It also goes deep into the realms of educational institutions (and) philanthropic institutions—and it’s not just to organizations that people would stereotypically define as conservative or liberal.”
Brad Friedman runs the website Kochwatch.org. He takes a darker view of the Koch brothers’ campus philanthropy. The Kochs “fund these various libertarian-leaning organizations under names like ‘Freedom Center’ in order to create more phony studies, and more dubious research,” he writes in an e-mail to the Weekly.
The goal, he writes, is to obscure the fact that Koch Industries “are sucking off the government teat billions in fossil-fuel subsidies, using the resources that belong to the people, while at the same time killing those people with poisons, rather than clean and renewable sources of energy that, unfortunately for them, happen to fall for free from the sky, and blow through the air.”
This article appears in May 5-11, 2011.
Interesting that ” the center plans to offer a degree program in economic instruction for high school teachers” The curriculum belongs to the faculty, not to donors. Where’s the faculty senate in all of this?
I don’t think anything nefarious is going on at Arizona Freedom Center. I just think they are ideologically driven to spread their almost religious belief in Libertarianism. This is evident by their desire to promote Libertarianism in schools and broaden it’s influence as stated by this quote.
“The fruits of that mission could be far-reaching. Schmidtz says the center plans to offer a degree program in economic instruction for high school teachers, and to generate texts for K-12 education. “We aim not only to produce the teachers, but the materials that are getting taught.”
Unfortunately, I think Libertarianism is a bankrupt philosophy of the selfish and the affluent, thus it’s support from people like the Koch Brothers. It appeals to certain ideologues, but most people disregard it once they delve into it to any depth.
http://www.leftycartoons.com/the-24-types-…
Freedom isn’t free. You have to buy it.
This article is foolish. It’s a lot of innuendo and accusations without facts.
Do you realize that (mostly left-leaning) philosophers rank the University of Arizona’s philosophy department as tied for #1 in political philosophy in the English-speaking world? Check for yourself here: http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/
This isn’t some case of right-wing money propping up hacks. It’s a case of right-wing money chasing people who are already established as leaders in the field. All that’s happening is that famous libertarian philosophers are getting concentrated in one place rather than spread out among other universities.
Vanderpool (quoting Brad Friedman) writes: “The Kochs ‘fund these various libertarian-leaning organizations under names like ‘Freedom Center’ in order to create more phony studies, and more dubious research.'”
How would ‘phony studies’ work in philosophy? There’s generally no empirical data to misreport. Are we worried that people will lie about their intuitions? Good heavens! ‘Dubious research’ is not going to make it past peer reviewers, and publications not vetted by peers are not taken seriously in philosophy.
Also, a quick look at the center’s faculty listing (http://www.arizonafreedomcenter.org/about.…) doesn’t exactly support the insinuation that these are ideological appointments. They have (1) a professor who defends equality and democracy, (2) one who writes primarily about metaphysics and free will, (3) an ancient philosopher, (4) a philosopher who has written a book arguing “that the state should promote the flourishing of all who are subject to its power”, and then two who seem like libertarian political philosophers, one of whom has been there for 15 years, as this article notes. It must be really hard to be a journalist. This took me five minutes of googling. Now what will I do with the rest of my day?
If the Kochs and other donors set out to stack this center with libertarians, it looks like they did a pretty poor job.
And really, the university wouldn’t reveal the name of an anonymous donor? That’s evidence of misconduct? I’ll be sure to avoid hospitals who list anonymous donors on their walls in the future. That money might have come from people who don’t share my ideology!
They own our congress. THey are pumping money into ASU and Uof A. Our governor was funded by him. Ducey’s budget cuts education funding tremendously which also indirectly cut funding from NPR (We wouldn’t want anyone to get educated at home. Yes AlEC contributes to NPR but that is scary too). Koch brothers are now pumping more and more into universities. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what is happening. These silly, brainwashed comments that there is no substance here. Well …. What more do you want? Them to directly approach you and say they are going to brainwash you? This is McCarthyism all over again. It is the playbook of the John Birch Society. If you doubt it, read “Wrapped in the Flag”. Ms. Conner predicted this a long time ago. It is happening and some of you will continue to pretend it isn’t. Sad. Or even worse, that it is good.
This is what the students are saying (from an e-mail):
“The Kochs aren’t Libertarians. But basically anti-Koch=pro-fascist. The Kochs joined Libertarians in the 70’s advocating for LGBT, unions free of government restrictions, the right to sue for pollution damages, exposing the global cooling orthodoxy (which is now the global warming one), and successfully fighting left and right totalitarians–all of which their present pseudo-progressive opponents then opposed.
They now fund the idea that if pro-market people are expected to fund colleges, the least colleges can do is not use the money to attack them and give them a fair hearing, typically in comparative philosophy courses. Thus the Kochs are the largest indirect corporate funders of the study of both John Locke–and Karl Marx. Horrors!”
For info on world Libertarianism, GOOGLE Libertarian International Organization