Details just now released about a 2008 agreement between Florida State University and the Charles G. Koch Foundation reveal that FSU has crossed a line in ceding control over faculty hiring to an outside group. An advisory committee selected by the foundation will vet and approve (or disapprove) prospective faculty appointments. While the committee will be composed of faculty members, it is nonetheless charged with evaluating ideological conformity with the foundation’s goals. That trespasses on the essential principle of complete university independence in hiring decisions, a principle essential in maintaining the quality and credibility of American higher education.
The advisory committee’s role, alas, does not conclude with the hiring process. It is also charged with filing annual reports on the progress and character of the way the agreement has been carried out. Since most of the funds are to be used for faculty appointments, this arrangement suggests an ongoing monitoring of whether a Koch funded appointee’s work remains in conformity with the foundation’s goals. While the potential impact of the reports remains vague, their very existence is troubling.
When a university makes a faculty appointment, it ordinarily knows how the cost will be budgeted. It is hardly plausible to imagine that the FSU economics department would be permitted to make an indefinite number of appointments in the hope that one would be funded by the Koch Foundation. The only practicable way to use this grant is to consent to ideological conformity from the outset. One might also note that appointing free-enterprise-friendly faculty members to American economics departments is, for some programs, fundamentally a project of bringing coal to Newcastle.
Funds would also be spent on a new undergraduate program in harmony with the Koch Foundation’s goals. This partly echoes efforts (arguably benighted) by the charitable arm of the BB&T Corporation to fund courses assigning Ayn Rand’s writings to undergraduates. As the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom commented in response in 2008, “Academic Institutions relinquish autonomy and the primary authority of their faculty over the curriculum when they accept outside funding that comes with such conditions attached. Committee A believes that the solicitation and acceptance of gifts, conditioned on a requirement to assign specific course material that the faculty would not otherwise assign, is inconsistent with the principles of academic freedom.”
While the amount of money at stake pales by comparison with other recent corporate grants, the FSU agreement both reinforces and adds disturbing new elements to the growing corporate influence over academic research. Academic freedom and shared governance are both threatened by these trends. Better principles governing such agreements are clearly necessary. So too is sunlight. The details of this agreement should have been freely available to all campus constituencies at the time it was being considered. While the FSU administration is to be congratulated for releasing the document now, the reputation of the university would have been better protected by full disclosure and debate at the time.
Cary Nelson
May 11, 2011