The Imaginary Threat of Koch Money to College Integrity – National Review

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Remember when some people wanted to protect college students from the terrible influence of leftist speakers? In North Carolina, e.g., the state had a ban on communist speakers on campuses in the UNC system. (That law was eventually struck down.)

These days, there are still people who want to protect students, but now, apparently, the threat comes not from Communists but from conservatives and libertarians.

In this Law & Liberty piece, Oglethorpe University professor Joseph Knippenberg reviews a recent book by Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola, Free Speech and Koch Money.

Knippenberg writes, In a nutshell, Wilson and Kamola contend that in large measure the campus free speech crisis is a product of the efforts of the Koch network, which funds the small handful of . . . campus activists, the provocative speakers they host, the media network that amplifies the ensuing controversy, the legal organizations that are involved in any subsequent litigation or threats of litigation, the think tanks that develop legislative responses, and the faculty and academic institutes that provide a veneer of academic respectability to the entire enterprise. It is a tempest in a teapot, stirred up by the plutocratic libertarians for their own ends, which largely involve recruiting people to their network to bolster their policy efforts at the state and federal level and to put their political adversaries on the defensive.

How despicable!

Knippenberg doesnt find the book persuasive. He concludes, As someone who was attracted to the academic life understood as the pursuit of wisdom for its own sake, I find Wilson and Kamolas vision at least as threatening as other efforts to instrumentalize learning. It is just as much a threat to the independence and integrity of the university as that posed by the Koch network that they deprecate. Nay, it is more of a threat: its end is, in a sense, totalizing and those who embrace it seem currently to hold a good bit of the academic high ground.

Several years ago, the Martin Center published a pro and con with Wilson arguing that outside conservative money was a threat to the mission of universities and Hillsdale economics professor Gary Wolfram arguing that there was no true threat. Read both and see which advocate has the better argument.

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The Imaginary Threat of Koch Money to College Integrity - National Review