A recent diary here laments the latest grovelling and scraping by academicians before oligarchs. At issue is Florida State University's deal with a couple of devils–or a least a couple of Koch-roaches.
The story is based on a column by two FSU professors who brought the issue to light last week. Full disclosure; the dean who signed off on the deal defends it saying that FSU administrators and lawyers did due diligence to protect academic freedom and independance in hiring faculty (the letter appeared in last Sunday's Tallahassee Democrat behind a pay wall). Interestingly, I think both columns will prove correct: the Kochsteufelgeschaft does refer to a specific number of faculty, not a blanket hiring demand: on the other hand in Florida's economy, Kochbucks will be the only ones available to hire any faculty at all.
But there's nothing new to see here. As for the selling of FSU's intellectual Social Sciences soul, that train—as an FSU economics major might write—has sailed years ago.
The FSU dean who lauds the Koch Foundation deal as such a boon to FSU students mentions in passing another Great Benefactor, one DeVoe Moore. A name probably unknown here in Kossacland but not, alas, unknown around Tallahassee.
For years DeVoe Moore has been in the public eye as a wealthy environment vandal (developer) who alternates between pontification about "self reliance" and "free enterprise", and demanding zoning exemptions for himself from our county and local governments. His hobbies are collecting cars and buying intellectual respectability from Florida State. After softening up the FSU administration with relatively innocuous scholarship gifts, in 1998 Moore was able to lumber our university with his own ¨academic center" where feckless FSU partygoers are inculcated with "private enterprise", "free markets" , and similar right-wing fairy tales.
Last year FSU's trustees renamed the largest building on campus The DeVoe L. Moore Center. The building is a strange hybrid of the main university administration, some high-tech departments, and the football stadium. Since his latest honor, Moore has been a regular pest on the opinion page of the Democrat, nattering on about the good ole days before government regulators started taking their jobs seriously in the 1990s. You can find some of Moore's prose here, free of charge.
So if a local, land-ruining hack can be a BMOC at FSU for over a decade, handing over another chunk of academic integrity to some real heavyweight plutocrats would be no big deal. Indeed, as several commentors in the original diary have noted, FSU is hardly unique in the time-honored activity of offering itself to the high bidders. How could mom-and-pop outfits like Monsanto take over so much of the world's food supply without their intellectual satraps in land grant universities? Would the Vietnam war turned into such a drawn-out mess if Pentagon militarists didn't have their Ivy League professors providing cover (see book reviews in The Nation, Oct. 6, 2008).
Part of the flood of right-wing claptrap will have a "made at Florida State" tag on it but we can expect it will be as unoriginal as the social arrangements that produce it.