Yesterday when talking about the $50 million going to climate denial organizations, we mentioned it was just a drop in the bucket compared to things like fossil fuel advertising budgets. But it’s also just a tenth of what the Koch network alone has spent on supporting climate and economic disinformation at Colleges and Universities.
Today, that’s our focus, thanks to the work of UnKoch My Campus, which works to expose and oppose the undue influence of Koch spending on colleges. And there’s plenty to cover. For example, they have a petition calling on Koch-funded schools and politicians to divest, and another calling on George Mason University to rename Buchanan Hall.
UnKoch is also doing plenty of real-world activism, for example, an April 4th event in DC to call on President Biden to cancel student debt, and as it turns out, Koch has long fought against public schools and was an early champion for the concept of student debt.
And for the students out there, UnKoch has a fellowship you can apply for and some great resources to help you become your own anti-Koch activist. Specifically, they recently published a Model Policy report, and it’s basically everything you need to find out if Koch’s on your campus, and if so, kick them out.
Because as UnKoch head Jasmine Banks wrote in a recent op-ed, “College students have been some of Charles Koch’s fiercest opponents,” and with the success of the divestment movement, “it’s student activists who are scaring the fossil fuel industry. And it should stay scared.”
What should they be scared about? As the report describes, “Charles Koch’s foundations have overseen over $458 million in grants to over 550 universities and higher ed adjacent non-profits from 2005-2019.”
And he’s not doing it out of the goodness of his heart. It’s part of their strategy. The report describes how “in 2014 the Charles Koch Foundation described the motivations of its university investments to other wealthy donors as a means to ‘building state-based capabilities and election capabilities’ by developing an ‘integrated’ ‘talent pipeline’ to achieve widespread support for, and adoption of, favorable policies at the state and federal levels. To this end, Koch has advised businessmen to support ‘only those programs, departments or schools that contribute in some way to [their] individual companies or to the general welfare of [the] free enterprise system.’”
And as you would be foolish not to expect, there are serious strings attached to Koch funding to universities. Once exposed, as UnKoch does, these relationships are self-evidently corrupt and often change once people realize, as the report details, that funders are getting say over hiring, curriculum, research targets, and other serious conflicts of interest.
It’s not just Koch, either. BP’s $500 million spend on UC Berkeley Energy Biosciences Institute “gave BP the power to determine which research proposals deserved funding” while Big Tobacco’s Phillip Morris had a “ $1.3 million contract with Virginia Commonwealth University” that “barred researchers from discussing or publishing research results without first consulting Philip Morris.”
If you’re a worried student (or parent), then fortunately, there are some steps you can take. First off, if it’s a public school, you can submit a Freedom of Information Act request for documents about who’s funding what at the school. The report then has various suggestions, based on what you find.
For example, if funding is referred to as gifts, not grants, UnKoch has a model policy for that. If you do find a Koch grant, then you might want to consult the guide for “Disaffiliation with the Charles Koch Foundation Model Motion” to see how you might get your school to divest. And if it’s more than just Koch, you might need the more comprehensive “Institutional Conflicts of Interest Model Motions.”
These model policies are based on ones that have been adopted, so they’re essentially built for you to drop your school’s name in and then run with!