As for colleges and universities, unfortunately, we now have people like the Koch brothers buying up academia. The Koch brothers are using their money to allow them to make hiring and termination decisions at some universities in order to corrupt academic institutions and spread their ideology and further their political power base at the price of honest academic pursuits and credibility. Our colleges are being corrupted.
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/koch-brothers-now-under-fire-corrupting
Here is the contract between the Kochs and FSU from 2008, worth $6M.
It creates an "Excellence in Economic Education" program, including creation of several new positions, and FSU agrees to hire and maintain a staff, who support the political and economic theory stated in the agreement, which includes the phrase "free voluntary processes and principles that promote social progress". It goes on to create a board picked by the Kochs who monitor compliance with this. Evidently,
free processes is English for
laissez-faire. Further, the Kochs' board gets to approve the new hires.
It raises a good question about the legality of any such agreement. FSU executives are employees of the State, and subject to liability for tort when acting in their individual capacity. I think that's prima facie here since I doubt their State law provides for them to enter into any agreement that permits outside influence over matters of curriculum and instruction or hiring. I suppose it would be difficult for a potential plaintiff to show standing, since it would require a claim of injury. That might be possible in the case of an applicant to a professorship who was rejected on the grounds of teaching against deregulation, but that would seem impossible to prove on any of several levels. The other case might be a student who could possibly claim harm from being instructed in the benefits of laissez-faire, but the alleged harm ends when the course is over, which would be before the complaint even reached the court for preliminary review. I suspect the Kochs' lawyers worked through this and realized that it was bullet-proof. Besides, with some $10B in annual profits to play with, the they could easily settle any such nuisance -- with the usual non-disclosure agreement to keep it out of the media -- for, say, a mere $100K or so?
In a way I'm surprised they picked FSU at all. Once source ranks them #91 in the US which isn't bad. But then their economics dept. scores at around #60 in the US, which could be interpreted as about as good as you can expect from a state school (1 out of 50). And then this is Florida, bastion of Jeb Bush and the hanging chad legacy, and (excluding, say, Miami) one of the snakepits of Southern fundamentalism.
Maybe it was a test, in anticipation of bigger fish. One of those is George Mason University, which got $16M. This is interesting for its extension campus in the Middle East. I think GMU is strong in climate science, which may be the actual target the Kochs had in mind. It's also a more likely training ground for future politicians.
I notice the Kochs are also funding non-profits, which blurs the question of how a non-profit can legally exist while under control or influence of a profit maker. This is yet another tentacle poking through the loopholes which ought to be severed by operation of law. Either that or it's time for a change, some new legislation that would outlaw these practices and weaken the power of special interests that have managed to wrap the Supreme Court around their little fingers.
Make no bones about it, America is under assault. But the attackers are not from without. They are from within. It is being played out every day on our airwaves, cable networks, and internet and in the halls of our government and now in the halls of academia as well.
As you say, we are under assault. We are certainly living in an era that should be known as
Cold War II: the civil war version. In this context the term "culture wars" is practically misleading.
The only hope for the distant future is that the Republican Congress commits political suicide with their mean stupid games like the one they are playing with the shutdown, and the Dems are in place to replace the next conservative Justice or two who leave the Supreme Court. Who knows how long that may take. But until then, this war of attrition is going to continue to starve public policy to death.
This would be comical were it not for the fact a good number of Republicans unquestioningly accept this crap as truth.
