'Dark Money, Charles Koch, and the UA Freedom Center' Panel Discussion Tuesday at UA

Kochs Off Campus is hosting a panel discussion, "Dark Money, Charles Koch, and the UA Freedom Center," Tuesday, April 3, 7pm, in Education Building 211 on the University of Arizona campus. I will be one of the panel members, along with: David Gibbs, Professor of History, Moderator; Samantha Parsons, UnKoch My Campus Grassroots Campaign Strategist; Douglas Weiner, Professor of History; and Jeremy Vetter, Associate Professor of History. The public is invited to attend.

The panel will discuss the history and current status of UA's Freedom Center as well as the course it created, "Phil 101: Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship,” which is being taught in four local school districts.

Before setting up the panel discussion, Kochs Off Campus invited David Schmidtz, the founding director of the Freedom Center, to participate in a public forum where he and David Gibbs would debate the topic, “Is the Freedom Center an Asset or a Liability for the University of Arizona?" Schmidtz refused the invitation.

On a related topic, Kochs Off Campus submitted a public records request to the University of Arizona in September of last year asking for a number of documents related to the Freedom Center. Six months later, in late March, UA supplied the documents. Most interesting to me is a list of the donors to the Freedom Center and the amount of their donations. The Freedom Center had volunteered the names of two donors before this, though Michael McKenna, who was then the director of the Freedom Center, wrote in a column in the Weekly that "roughly two dozen donors" contributed $16 million. The UA documents list only 14 donors and a total of $8,325,000, meaning its list is incomplete. More on this in a later post.