Do donors have too much influence over universities? – University World News

NORTH AMERICA

For this University of Toronto (UT) law professor as well as for Vincent Wong, a Toronto lawyer and former lecturer at the universitys law school, Exhibit A for undue donor influence is not the expected perk of naming of a building as it is in so many American colleges and universities which have accepted gifts with strings attached from foundations such as Charles Koch Foundation.

Rather, it is the controversy the dean of the faculty of law, Edward Iacobucci, touched off in early September 2020 when he set aside the unanimous recommendation of the hiring committee (which Wong served on) that Dr Valentina Azarova be offered the directorship of the universitys International Human Rights Program (IHRP).

Students and teachers at UT demanded her reinstatement after claims that the offer was rescinded by management due to her work on human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel, and that the decision allegedly was made under pressure from Tax Court of Canada Judge David E Spiro, whose family had donated CA$10 million (US$8 million) to the universitys medical schools.

To quell the row, Iacobucci turned to retired Supreme Court of Canada justice, Thomas Cromwell, to look into it.

According to both Raume and Wong, Cromwells report, which was released on 29 March 2021, hardly supports his assertion that I would not draw the inference that external influence played any role in the decision to discontinue the recruitment of the Preferred Candidate, Cromwells rather twee way of referring to Azarova, even though she had been identified in the press.

On 4 September 2019, spurred by an e-mail from the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs that said Azarova was academically unworthy and that her appointment could lead to a public protest campaign [that] will do major damage to the university, including in fundraising, Judge Spiro wrote to the assistant vice president responsible for donor stewardship, whom Wong believes to be Chantelle Courtney.

Both Raume and Wong dismiss the slur against the University of Manchester international law scholar who has written extensively on the Palestine/Israel issue.

Over the next few hours, Spiros message was relayed up the ladder to the law schools assistant dean of alumni and development, the dean of the Juris Doctor programme and, finally, to Dean Iacobucci. As Wong told University World News, not one of these university officials replied that hiring decisions were confidential and strictly internal affairs.

Despite Iacobuccis instructions that there be no further communication with Spiro, early in the afternoon of 4 September, Courtney wrote to the Alumnus (Cromwells locution for Spiro, even though his name had been widely reported in the press, especially after he became the subject of a complaint before the Canadian Judicial Council in October 2020 alleging that the Tax Court judge had breached the ethical guidelines; a formal inquiry is ongoing).

According to Cromwell, Courtney wrote: Quick update understand from [the Dean] that no decisions have been made in the matter discussed. Ive communicated the points discussed and he will connect w[sic] me next week. Look forward to closing the loop w[sic] you.

A few days later, Iacobucci announced that negotiations with Azarova had ended and that he was dissolving the search committee and starting the search again. The deans reason, that the university and Azarova had not been able to agree on whether she would spend the summers in Toronto, surprised Wong, who had been told by another member of the committee that negotiations were proceeding apace.

Upping the ante on Cromwells assertion that there was no smoking gun that would allow him to find that the Alumnus had influenced the decision not to hire Azarova, Raume says: You dont have to watch murder mysteries on television to know that [the question of where Azarova would spend the summers] usually set off alarm bells in the detectives head.

The controversy led to a series of resignations at the university, including Law Professor Audrey Macklin, who resigned from the faculty advisory board she had chaired and which had supported the hiring committee in its unanimous finding that Azarova was the best candidate for the position. The committee told Iacobucci that Azarovas writings on Israel were well within the zone of professional legal studies.

Wong also resigned from his position as a researcher at the IHRP so that he could speak out.

More than 100 IHRP students and alumni sent a letter to Iacobucci, calling for a thorough and public review of donor practices at the law school, as well as of the alleged improper external influence and pressure by, in this case, a member of the judiciary.

For his part, Iacobucci denied that Azarova was offered a job or that outside influence played a part even though she said she was offered it on 11 August and accepted on 19 August 2019, according to the Globe and Mail.

In a letter sent to the faculty of law, Iacobucci said: Even the most basic of the conjectures that are circulating in public, that an offer was made and rescinded, is false, adding that he would never allow outside pressure to be a factor in a hiring decision.

Iacobucci said no offer of employment was made due to legal constraints on cross-border hiring within the timeframe required. Other considerations, including political views for and against any candidate, or their scholarship, were and are irrelevant, he wrote.

However, on 22 April 2021, delegates from the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Council voted to censure the University of Toronto the first time it has issued a censure to any university since 2008 because of the administrations failure to resolve concerns regarding academic freedom stemming from the hiring controversy.

When reviewing all the evidence, CAUT Council delegates concluded that the decision to cancel Dr Valentina Azarovas hiring was politically motivated, and as such constitutes a serious breach of widely recognised principles of academic freedom, said CAUT Executive Director David Robinson.

In a close examination of the facts of the case, CAUT Council found it implausible to conclude that the donors call did not trigger the subsequent actions resulting in the sudden termination of the hiring process, noted Robinson. The University of Toronto Administration could have re-offered the still-vacant position of director of the International Human Rights Program (IHRP) to Dr Azarova.

Ohio State University political philosopher Emma Saunders-Hastings, author of the forthcoming Private Virtues, Public Vices: Philanthropy and Democratic Equality, believes that while the University of Toronto case is interesting because it looks like a particularly obvious case of donor influence in short-circuiting a decision that had already been made by other people, the case shows more about how influence works within university administrations.

Anyone whos been around a university knows that often influence is much more subtle. It doesnt even have to be the donor exerting influence. There is such a hunger for donations that fundraisers and administrators spend a fair bit of time thinking about what would appeal to donors. How we could better attract donors, she says.

Disinvestment drives donor reliance

Between 1985 and 2019, the percentage of university operating revenues paid for by provincial governments in Canada dropped from 81% to 47%. Similar disinvestment by governments across the United States is one of the main drivers allowing donors such as the Koch family and the foundations it supports, and the Sackler family, to capture entire faculties.

According to Bethany Letiecq, professor of human development and family science at George Mason University in Virginia, the drive to disinvest in higher education dates back to the 1970s when the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, pointed to the anti-war and civil rights protests on the campuses of the states universities and said: You know what the problem with universities is, they inspire critique and questioning and demand transparency.

The disinvestment that followed in California and elsewhere opened the door to a different kind of big-money donor than had traditionally existed. The Rockefeller family and foundation cut multimillion dollar cheques to universities and colleges across the country. But once the money had been given, notes Saunders-Hastings, they were pretty hands-off.

The same cannot be said of the Richard and David Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, the company that marketed the opioid OxyContin, the main drug in the opioid crisis; in 2020 Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers agreed to an US$8 billion settlement. The Sacklers are what Saunders-Hastings calls venture philanthropists who believe that since they are giving the money, they should exercise oversight over how the money is spent.

Over the course of several decades, the Sacklers and the company donated US$15 million to Tufts University in Boston.

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rules stipulate that for a charitable gift to qualify as tax deductible, the donor must relinquish control over the gift and trust that the institution will follow the stipulations in the gift agreement.

For example, a donor can stipulate that a gift be used to research COVID-19 vaccines on children and that the research be done in the United States. A donor cannot, however, say that they want a particular researcher to be part of the programme or direct the outcomes of the research.

When she saw the gift agreement between the Sacklers and Tufts, Audrey Kintzi, executive director of the Philanthropy and Development Program at Saint Marys University of Minnesota and a member of the ethics committee of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, could scarcely believe what she saw.

Yikes!" she said. Who wrote this thing? she asked University World News.

Under the agreement, Purdue Pharma appointed one member of the steering committee of the Pain Research, Education and Policy (PREP) Program, a graduate programme that received US$300,000 per year from 1998 to 2004 and US$500,000 per year for the following three years.

Further blurring the lines, Purdue Pharma was allowed the option to collaborate on Tufts research and to attend Tufts pain management symposia. The company even laid claim to developing curricula for the programme.

In a January 2019 memorandum filed with the states Superior Court, Maura Healey, attorney general for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, summed up the PREP programme as a degree program at Tufts University [designed] to influence doctors to use its [Purdue Pharmas] drugs.

Healey also detailed how, in addition to funding the PREP Program, the Sackler family pursued an intense relationship with the university, one of the fruits of which was the renaming of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences as the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences.

According to Healey, Purdue got to control research on the treatment of pain coming out of a prominent and respected institution of learning.

Tufts staff sent the Sackler reports showing how Tufts and its affiliated hospitals helped Purdue develop a publication for patients entitled Taking Control of Your Pain, that touted the benefits of opioids. Healey cited a 2000 memorandum noting the importance of finding opportunities for Purdue to influence the work of Tufts in the Massachusetts medical marketplace and beyond.

Given the cosy relationship between the Sacklers and Tufts Raymond Sackler served on the universitys medical school advisory board for almost 20 years beginning in the late 1990s it seems almost predictable that the gift agreement was written on Purdue Pharma, not Tufts, letterhead.

Nor is it surprising that in his report released in December 2019, Sanford Remz, one of the lawyers Tufts hired to investigate the schools relationship, could not find the usual paper trail that would lead to a gift agreement.

The absence of these records, which should have been electronic, stunned Ann Boyd-Stewart, assistant dean for development and alumni relations at Indiana Universitys Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. She told the Chronicle of Higher Education last year: It cant be that backward, an institution thats been around that long [it was founded in 1852], before asking incredulously, They have no policies in place?

Boyd-Stewart summed up the situation at Tufts as, Look the other way; just get the money.

Indeed, in 2013, six years after Purdue Pharma executives pled guilty to charges brought by the United States Justice Department, Tufts President Anthony Monaco travelled to Purdue Pharmas headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, to present an honorary doctorate to the very ill Raymond Sackler.

There was money there. Thats why they gave the honorary degree, Boyd-Stewart says.

Even as students militated for it to end, and as state after state sued Purdue Pharma over the opioid crisis, Tufts stubbornly maintained its connection with the Sacklers. Given universities penchant for avoiding controversy, even more surprisingly, Tufts relationship with Purdue Pharma survived the 2017 exposs, published in Esquire and The New Yorker, about how deeply the Sacklers were enmeshed in the university.

Prompted by Remz report, Tufts announced it was severing its links to the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, and ending the PREP Program this year. Perhaps the most public disavowal of the Sacklers was the image of a man standing on a ladder chiselling Arthur M Sacklers name off the Tufts Medical Center building.

Using wealth to leverage influence

We understand that wealthy folk, billionaires in particular, have always used their wealth to leverage influence, Jasmine Banks, executive director of the public interest research non-profit UnKoch My Campus, told University World News.

Charles Koch and his donor network are, however, unmatched in the level of their impact and influence that is used to capture our common good institutions such as universities.

Koch is an American businessman and philanthropist who this month was ranked the 16th richest person in the world by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

According to UnKoch My Campus, between 2005 and 2018, Charles and his brother David and the seven foundations they fund have donated US$344,582,039 to almost 550 colleges and universities, the vast majority of which are in the United States.

Abroad, the Kochs donated to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Liechtenstein, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University of Hong Kong, as well as three in Canada: Carleton University in Ottawa, McGill University in Montreal and University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

Founded only in 1972 and thus lacking a large endowment, George Mason University (GMU) in Virginia was particularly susceptible to the Koch brothers money. The lions share of the $100 million was divided between GMUs economics department, which is now dominated by libertarian-leaning economists, and GMU law school's Law and Economics Center, Letiecq says.

Ten million dollars of Koch money and US$20 million from an anonymous donor enticed GMU to rename its law school the Antonin Scalia Law School, commemorating one of the most conservative United States Supreme Court justices in American history, who died in 2016.

The Koch brothers foundation money also bought them seats on the committee that chooses the professorships they fund. UnKoch My Campus found that the professors selected followed the Ayn Rand philosophy of anti-government and unconstrained capitalism.

Rand, it should be noted, is a favourite of wealthy donors who seek undue influence (as well as of former US congressman Ron Paul, who named his son, the present junior and libertarian senator from Kentucky, Rand).

According to Gwendolyn Bradley, senior program officer for the American Association of University Professors: One of the most egregious examples of the past decade involves BB&T Corporation, a banking company, which reportedly made major gifts through its foundation to at least 60 universities, many of them public. ... [Institutions were required] to teach a course on a particular political perspective Objectivism and the morality of capitalism, including Ayn Rands book Atlas Shrugged.

Koch money reaches out from GMU to influence both the federal government in Washington a scant 20 miles away and state governments across the country.

The law schools Law and Economic Center regularly hosts corporate-backed free market educational workshops for federal and state judges and attorneys general.

The Koch-funded Mercatus Center at GMU works with the Koch-funded (but innocuously named) American Legislative Exchange Council and the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), another Koch-funded institute nestled in GMU, to act as bill mills, which write draft bills such as the infamous bathroom bill that would ban transgendered people from using female washrooms. Republicans at the state level then propose such drafts in the state legislatures.

According to Letiecq, both Mercatus and IHS pay little or no rent to GMU, yet their staff receive university benefits such as tuition waivers. Charles Koch is the chair of the IHS, Koch-funded faculty are members of the board of both Mercatus and IHS and some other members are affiliated with the Charles Koch Foundation.

GMU has virtually no oversight of either corporation, yet both benefit from their affiliation with GMU, which provides them with a veneer of academic and intellectual legitimacy, Letiecq says.

Pouring millions into Republican coffers

Late last November, as then-president Donald Trump and his supporters were spreading the lie that the federal election had been stolen, Charles Koch appeared to take some responsibility for the partisan division he abetted by pouring millions into Republican Party coffers, by stating, Boy, did we screw up.

And yet, at the same time, seven hours up Interstate 95 in Boston, Massachusetts, and notwithstanding the new donor guidelines the Tufts administration was committed to in order to prevent a repeat of the Sackler scandal, Tufts University and the Koch family were readying to announce the opening of the Tufts Center for State Policy Analysis (cSPA), funded by a grant from GMUs Mercatus Center.

The cSPA bills itself as a nonpartisan analytical centre modelled on the Congressional Budget Office. It hardly is, for Charles Koch sits on the board and has influence over hiring decisions.

Indeed, the cSPA resembles other institutes set up by the Koch family. As Banks of UnKoch My Campus notes, referring to the regulatory study centre at GMU, the cSPA will also be full of Koch-funded researchers and also accepts Koch funding and then, surprise, surprise, they are absolutely against meaningful regulation of fossil fuels [the Koch fortune comes from oil and gas].

In fact, the gift establishing the cSPA was not Kochs first major gift to Tufts. Two years earlier, the university received US$3 million to establish the Center for Strategic Studies.

According to the universitys student newspaper, The Tufts Daily, this donation received relatively little backlash because it went to academics deeply sceptical of foreign intervention who made credible-sounding statements about remaining independent.

Letiecq would take a less charitable view, classifying it as part of the Koch familys charm offensive. This grant and even ones like the US$15,000 to Sarah Lawrence College, a small liberal arts college near New York that is renowned for its left-wing views, have two possible functions, she says.

First, they can be viewed as a test. The thinking goes that the Kochs will give small amounts to see if someone comes back, says Letiecq. The Kochs can see if there is movement around the acceptance of the money and activities desired by the Kochs.

If they accept small donations, then maybe they would be welcoming of a large donation and of building a deeper relationship, Letiecq told University World News.

The other possibility is that the Kochs know they are under scrutiny and they want to hide behind a veneer of respectability, Letiecq added. Look, were not so bad. Look at what we are doing. And that hides the work they are doing that is anti-government, anti-labour, anti-tax, anti-environmental regulation.

Knowing what line not to cross

All of the North American colleges and universities examined here are either developing or have strongly written policies designed to prevent undue donor influence.

For instance, the University of Torontos guidelines for donations, states: The University does not accept gifts that require it to provide valuable consideration to the donor or anyone designated by the donor, such as employment in the University, enrolment in a University program, or a University procurement contract.

To these, Kintzi says, what is also needed is better education of both donors and university grant acceptance officers. Both must be made aware not only of the law, especially the IRS regulations (and, in Canada, the Canada Revenue Agencys), but also of what constitutes a conflict of interest and what cannot be written into a gift agreement.

University officers must have a strong ethical backbone and be willing to say to donors, there is the line and you cannot cross it. And faculty and students must keep a wary eye on big money grants.

Saunders-Hastings agrees. She closed our interview by saying: It feels bad to criticise the generous person who you think is generally doing good things for the institution or department. But theres a need to cultivate a certain ingratitude that makes the criticism by university officials, students and faculty possible.

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Do donors have too much influence over universities? - University World News