Fred Block | Research professor of sociology at U.C. Davis
Koch Brothers Attempt to Tilt Faculty Hiring
Charles and David Koch have been especially active in using their billions to advance their market fundamentalist agenda at public universities.
The Center for Engaged Scholarship was created to fight back against right-wing efforts to impose a narrow “free market” ideological orthodoxy on higher education. Charles and David Koch have been especially active in using their billions to advance their market fundamentalist agenda at public universities.
Thanks to excellent reporting by Becky Johnson at The Smokey Mountain News, we have new evidence of how this process works. The project is to use a two million dollar donation from one of their foundations to tilt faculty recruitment in favor of free market economists on the campus of West Carolina University, part of North Carolina’s public university system.
The plan is laid out in excruciating detail in a memo written by a WCU faculty member in economics to a program officer at the Charles Koch Foundation.
The newspaper obtained the memo through a public records request. Other faculty members at West Carolina University are not at all happy that outside money is being used to leverage the hiring of faculty with one particular ideological standpoint. Read More