From: Truth Dig
Posted on Jun 2, 2016
By Alex Kotch / AlterNet
This piece first appeared at AlterNet.
Charles Koch is known for being CEO of industrial giant Koch
Industries and a chief financier of the massive conservative political
operation he runs with his brother David. In recent years, student
activists and investigative journalists have exposed another of Koch’s
hats: mega-donor to hundreds of colleges and universities, often funding
free-market-focused academic centers housed at public and private
schools alike. One Koch-funded program is advocating cutthroat economics
to grade school students, even sacrificing lives for profits.
Anti-tax
industrialist billionaires like Charles and David Koch stand to gain a
lot by financing higher education programs tailored to their ideologies.
Richard Fink, the Kochs’ right-hand man for decades, laid out their
“Structure of Social Change,” the plan they devised in the late 1970s to
shape society with their libertarian ideals. The plan begins with
funding academic programs that favor laissez-faire economics, resulting
in academic papers promoting the free market and chastising regulation
and taxation. Next, think tanks they fund repackage the academic work
into more easily digestible policy proposals that “citizen activists”
(actually Koch-funded “social welfare” groups like Americans for
Prosperity) use to pressure lawmakers.
From 2005 to 2014, the Charles Koch Foundation doled out nearly $108 million
to colleges and universities. The school that has accepted the second
highest total from the Charles Koch Foundation from 2005 to 2014 is
Florida State University, whose economics department entered into a 2008
agreement that gave the foundation a say in its curriculum and hiring
decisions, as Dave Levinthal of the Center for Public Integrity reported. One part of the 2008 agreement,
which proposed a $6.6 million budget to be funded by the Charles Koch
Foundation and unnamed “Donor Partners,” established a “Program for
Excellence in Economic Education” within the Gus A. Stavros Center for
the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Economic Education, part of the
economics department. Annual reports confirm these funding arrangements. MORE
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