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<!-- you can have any number of categories here --> [[Category:Henry Farrell]] [[Category:George Mason University Economics Department]] [[Category:Mercatus Center]] [[Category:Kochtopus]] <!-- 1 URL must be followed by >= 0 Other URL and Old URL and 1 End URL.--> {{URL | url = http://crookedtimber.org/2018/05/01/the-public-choice-of-public-choice/}} <!-- {{Other URL | url = }} --> <!-- {{Old URL | url = }} --> {{End URL}} {{DES | des = 10 formerly secret agreements between Koch-funded donations to public [[George Mason University Economics Department|George Mason University]] reveal what has long been expected: an appalling breach of academic responsibility. "The ordinary protection against conflict of interest, and against donors using the university’s reputation as an ideological/financial cutout or flag of convenience is to build institutional firewalls..." | show=}} <!-- insert wiki page text here --> <!-- DPL has problems with categories that have a single quote in them. Use these explicit workarounds. --> <!-- otherwise, we would use {{Links}} and {{Quotes}} --> {{List|title=The public choice of public choice|links=true}} {{Quotations|title=The public choice of public choice|quotes=true}} {{Text | Years ago, I joked about coming up with “a simple public choice explanation for the emergence of public choice”. Now this: In defending its financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation—some $50 million worth, as of 2016—George Mason University has cited its academic independence from donors. Yet George Mason is less independent than it has let on, according to documents released last week via an open-records request, and amid an ongoing suit about donor transparency brought by student activists. Angel Cabrera, university president since 2012, shared the news with faculty members in an email, saying, “I was made aware of a number of gift agreements that were accepted by the university between 2003 and 2011 and raise questions concerning donor influence in academic matters.” The gifts, in support of faculty positions in economics, “granted donors some participation in faculty selection and evaluation,” Cabrera said, noting that one such agreement is still active (the rest have expired). All 10 of the now-public agreements relate to the university’s Mercatus Center for free market research, a locus of Koch-funded activity. Three of the agreements involve Koch. The two most recent, from 2007 and 2009, stipulate the creation of a five-member selection committee to select a professor, with two of those committee members chosen by donors. The other Koch agreement, from 1990, also afforded Koch a role in naming a professor to fund. George Mason also allowed Koch a role in evaluating professors’ performance via advisory boards. And while the agreements assert that final say in faculty appointments will be based on normal university procedures, the 2009 agreement says that funds will be returned to the donor if the provost and the selection committee can’t agree on a candidate. … The university has consistently said that the foundation is a private entity and that compromising the confidential nature of donations through that avenue by releasing such documents could chill giving. Koch was a joint, $10 million donor on the law school deal. Barring the unlikely release of some exonerating evidence, this looks pretty bad. The job of university development offices is to raise money for the universities, and in many disciplines and departments, scholars who bring in large grants will be smiled upon (in most of the sciences, grant raising is more or less part of your job description). This obviously creates cross-pressures between the general role of the university, which is supposed to engage in more or less disinterested inquiry, and the incentives of individual employees and subunits within the university, as well as a gray area in which the political motivations of potential donors and the political motivations of academics may coincide. The ordinary protection against conflict of interest, and against donors using the university’s reputation as an ideological/financial cutout or flag of convenience is to build institutional firewalls, which allow donors to provide large money with broad conditions attached (such as: this money should be used to hire an endowed professor carrying out research and teaching on Topic X) but without specific controls on who that professor is. This is at best imperfect – but it at least somewhat curbs the voracity of development officers and individual academic “entrepreneurs.” It would appear that any such firewalls were comprehensively breached at George Mason University (which is a public university, with consequent public obligations). The ferocity of the university administration’s efforts to keep the arrangements secret suggest the reputational damage that the university now faces. It’s also worth observing that many GMU faculty have suspected something like this for a long time, but weren’t able to get straight answers from the administration until its hand was forced by this lawsuit. Finally, it’s notable that the person representing the interests of an as-yet unnamed big donor to the law school is Leonard Leo, who is the Federalist Society officer largely responsible for the ideological vetting of judges for the Trump administration. That doesn’t say great things either. }}
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