This story is exactly why the Koch brothers worked so hard to keep their vast network of extreme anti-government organizations so secret. It's a local news story investigating the infiltration by the Kochs into the local university.
A Western Carolina University professor with ties to the ultra-conservative Koch brothers political network worked behind the scenes with outside donors to devise a coordinated strategy that would influence the hiring of professors and use WCU to further conservative economic theory in society, according to a review of university email communications.
"lf things do go the faculty's way with these hires, then WCU would be poised to emerge as a powerhouse of student development and research in the areas of economic freedom and free market policy analysis," wrote Dr. Ed Lopez, an economics professor, in an email to the Koch Foundation in July.
At the time, Lopez was laying the groundwork for a $2 million gift from the Koch Foundation. In exchange, the Koch Foundation could advance its own mission of cultivating "a pipeline of students" trained in free enterprise theory and seeing free-enterprise "thought-leaders," Lopez wrote in the email. […]
[S]trategy communications between Lopez and the Koch Foundation—obtained through a public records request by The Smoky Mountain News—suggest part of Lopez's goal is to stack the economics department faculty with professors who support conservative economic theory. Lopez described what he called "the hiring possibilities and my proposed strategy for successfully navigating them" in the planning document sent to the Koch Foundation in July.
The goal is clearly not just Lopez's. He's the puppet for the Koch brothers and this is just one example of the network the Kochs have created throughout universities in the country loosely based on the Nazi model for indoctrinating the next generations of leaders.
The good news is that the Kochs aren't able to do this in secret anymore. A concerted effort by a number of progressive organizations and media outlets to expose their work has made it into the traditional media, gained the attention of one of the country's leading investigative journalists and now even into local and regional media, as this terrific story attests.