Koch Family Supports Higher Ed Everywhere
Who cares if the Koch family foundations give cash to your favorite college or university?
If you don’t think your school should get a grant from “The Kochs,” you’re probably too late, since the list of beneficiaries is as long as your arm and includes every ivy-covered institution and a lot which are just plain brick and concrete. The University of Nebraska at both Omaha and Lincoln got cash, as did Creighton and Harvard and Missouri and Texas Tech and…well, you name it, it’s likely on the list.
And yet, right wing critics of academe still think it’s a hotbed of hippies with long hair and B.O. making community organizers out of innocent young farm kids.
The Charles Koch Foundation states that it does not have veto power of who is hired to teach or what is taught, although it has been criticized for doing so at schools such as George Mason (which for the tens of millions it has received from Koch interests should have been renamed you-know-what years ago)!
I was a proud Democratic teacher for decades and was a leader in the AAUP, the teachers’ group which stood up for academic freedom, but was hardly a hard-boiled union in the fashion of the CIO. I was happy to see the Federalist Society come to Creighton and welcomed speakers on the right from Clarence Thomas to Robert Bork to chief Nixon plumbers operative Gordon Liddy.
A school is only as good as the diversity of ideas it tolerates, and if it doesn’t encourage a world of ideas it deserves to be known as a beauty school.
As for the Kochs, living and dead, they take their places in the world of higher education along with Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, barons of industry in a golden age who made their fortunes on the backs of workers just as they endowed great universities.
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