RUTHFULLY YOURS

The success of America’s institutions of higher learning is thanks in no small part to the largesse of America’s most generous citizens — persons with names such as Rockefeller and Carnegie. That tradition continues today. But one of the names has left-wing groups in a fit.

According to UnKoch My Campus (UKMC), a group of “students and activists” dedicated to exposing “the Kochs and their vast network of front groups,” the brothers have donated to more than 300 colleges since 2005. Kelly Riddell of the Washington Times estimated the total amount at $68 million as of 2013. UKMC alleges that these donations are intended “to undermine the issues many students today care about: environmental protection, worker’s rights, healthcare expansion, and quality public education, to name just a few.”

Supposedly in the interest of “accountability,” UKMC has been using open-records laws to intimidate professors and administrators involved in any academic work associated with Koch donations.

Last year, Ross Emmett, co-director of Michigan State University’s Center for Innovation & Economic Prosperity, who used Koch money to found a seminar — the Koch Scholars — that studies political economists such as F. A. Hayek and Karl Marx, was forced to release documents to student activists. In 2014, the head of the University of Kansas’s Students for a Sustainable Future filed a state records request demanding a decade’s worth of private correspondence from Professor Art Hall, director of the Center for Applied Economics at the University of Kansas School of Business. Hall, who had received a seed grant from the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation and testified against green-energy quotas before the state legislature, sued, alleging a “fishing expedition.” A year later, he reached a settlement with the university.

Other examples abound. This is UKMC’s m.o. “File [an] Open Record Request to connect the missing pieces in your research and get the documentation needed to PROVE undue Koch influence if it exists,” UKMC advises in its “Campus Organizer’s Guide,” which also dedicates several pages to listing groups such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council that are “part of the Koch-funded climate denial efforts.”

The latest salvo in UKMC’s efforts to clamp down on competing opinions is what it calls “Kochileaks,” the publication of “exclusive audio recorded during the annual meeting of the Association of Private Enterprise Education” in Las Vegas in April. Here’s UKMC’s breathless description of its exposé:

In the recordings, professors from Koch-funded schools . . . speak frankly about attempts to dodge transparency requests by their students and faculty, mention their cozy relationships with high-level university administrators, mock journalists and portray anything other than their own free market teachings — including humanities, social sciences, gender studies and diversity initiatives — as laughable.

It’s damning evidence of the lengths to which the Charles Koch Foundation is going to turn both public and private universities into incubators for its free market ideology, and destroying academic freedom in the process.

Actually, it’s not. UKMC released approximately 90 minutes of audio from four APEE Conference panels, along with full transcripts, and the record reflects almost none of what the above claims. Instead of conniving faculty plotting to advance Charles Koch’s corporate interests, audience members were treated to statements such as the following, from economist Peter Boettke of George Mason University (“ground zero for Koch influence in higher education,” UKMC has said):

You simply cannot neatly divide the world into those who are stupid, those who are evil, and those who agree with you, and have a healthy and vibrant existence as a lifelong learner. And that, ultimately, at the end of the day, is what we all want to do. That’s why we’re in this business. We get excited about ideas, we want to continually learn about ideas throughout our life, and continually improve our understanding of the human condition.

That’s less than three minutes into the first recording.

Throughout the transcripts UKMC highlights what it clearly believes are the most nefarious statements. For instance, Brennan Brown, a program officer with the Koch Foundation, is quoted as arguing that, “It’s also about important research that a lot of you are doing that’s timely, that’s relevant, that’s focused on a particular issue, that’s rooted in a republic of science, and it’s also too about mentorship. Academic and professional mentorship.” UKMC failed to excerpt the harrowing sentence immediately prior: “This is about being an entrepreneur, an intellectual entrepreneur, or an edu-preneur, and focusing in on ways in which you can engage students in meaningful conversations about a marketplace of ideas, a diversity of thought.” Eek!

UKMC also underscores an anecdote from Troy University economics professor George Crowley:

This one student we had never heard of, poli-sci major, showed up, literally sat there silently throughout the entire, like, ten weeks of the class, didn’t make a comment the whole time. We had them write little essays at the end, and he basically wrote an essay that said “I am a socialist, but now that I’ve been finally been exposed to some of these ideas, I’m very interested in taking economics.”

A student at a university is being exposed to alternative perspectives! The humanity!

This is what UKMC calls “damning evidence” that the Kochs’ “corporate interests” have poisoned American academia.

Those on the right wing of the political spectrum will find little objectionable in free-marketers trying to create space on college campuses for their perspective. The dominance of left-leaning thinkers — in almost every discipline, not just economics — on American campuses has been a fact for more than 50 years. If UKMC were actually in favor of “academic freedom,” as it purports, shouldn’t that mean encouraging the free and vigorous exchange of conflicting ideas? Shouldn’t a socialist be able to read Milton Friedman?

RELATED: The Fight for Free Speech on Campus Is No Mere ‘Charade’

But even if UKMC does not accept the fact of liberal hegemony in academia, its sanctimonious mission to guarantee “accountability, transparency, and academic freedom” rings hollow, given that its sole target is the Kochs — who are far from the only politically motivated donors to institutions of higher learning.

Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer is responsible for the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford, which expressly aims to influence energy policy. The Center cost Steyer $40 million.

In 2012, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations gave a grant to MIT’s “DREAMtech, a joint project of the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media and the United We DREAM Network (UWD), to provide support for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy implementation,” President Obama’s executive amnesty of dubious constitutionality. In 2014, a donation to the Media Lab was used to bring Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson to campus to help chronicle police violence. Mckesson is hardly an unbiased observer. According to Kelly Riddell, Soros’s OSF gave $26.4 million to universities in 2013 alone.

And at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, one can find the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research — both funded in large part by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose post-mayoral activities have focused on restricting Second Amendment rights. In total, Bloomberg has given more than $1 billion to Johns Hopkins.

Meanwhile, there is conspicuous evidence that academics stand to profit handsomely by turning out work friendly to prominent left-wing causes. At the very same, notoriously Koch-funded, George Mason University, Jagadish Shukla, a professor of climate dynamics, has pocketed $5.6 million in compensation since 2001 from his Institute of Global Environment and Society, a nonprofit whose “business manager” is Shukla’s wife, Anastasia, and whose “assistant business manager”/”assistant to the president” is their daughter, Sonia. This is of no interest to UnKoch My Campus — who, coincidentally, count among their “partners” Greenpeace and ClimateTruth.org, both of whom have long been engaged in a concerted campaign against “climate deniers.” ClimateTruth.org describes ALEC, one of UKMC’s targets, as “a climate denial group . . . [that] spreads climate misinformation.”

The transformation of colleges into billion-dollar research institutions made inevitable the jockeying for influence that is now part and parcel of university life. Everyone wants to give their cause a leg up. Charles Koch and Tom Steyer have philosophical commitments that they want to promote in the academic world, and UnKoch My Campus and similar groups are within their rights to push back.

But there’s a crucial distinction to be made between pushing back against actual pernicious influence, and trying to silence opinions with which one disagrees. Under the guise of promoting “academic freedom,” UnKoch My Campus is clearly only interested in the latter.

— Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute.