Right-wing billionaires purchasing own professors

By Alex Pareene
Salon.com

In the marketplace of ideas, all that matters is the strength of your argument, and whether or not you are a billionaire. That is the wonderful ideal America is striving for: the unregulated free exchange of paid-for speech representing the interests of an incredibly elite few. And to that end, Charles Koch, of the Koch brothers (official "bad guys" of liberalism in 2011), is purchasing the economics department of Florida State University.

That is, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation has pledged $1.5 million to FSU, to endow two professorships. But it is not a regular endowment, where a person gives a school money and they use the money to hire someone. This is the kind where a person gives a school money and then tells them whom they can and can't hire based on prospective candidates' adherence to the donor's self-serving wealth-worshiping ideology:

David W. Rasmussen, dean of the College of Social Sciences, defended the deal, initiated by an FSU graduate working for Koch. During the first round of hiring in 2009, Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty's suggestions but ultimately agreed on two candidates. Although the deal was signed in 2008 with little public controversy, the issue revived last week when two FSU professors — one retired, one active — criticized the contract in the Tallahassee Democrat as an affront to academic freedom.

(More here. LP NOTE: Colleges and universities have struggled with this issue for centuries — that is, whether to accept or not bequests and donations subject to idealogical strings. Results are mixed. Sometimes the bequests have been the undoing of the institution. In other circumstances the conditions of the bequest become muted or legally disallowed over time. In still other cases, such as at my alma mater, The Colorado College, circumstances during the turbulent '60s forced the school's administration to make decisions between what existing funding sources desired and what it felt was best for the college. Fortunately in CC's case, new and more generous funding presented itself no doubt partially because the college's administration boldly chose to follow a path of independence and foresight rather than to kowtow to those existing funding sources.)