ThinkProgress: The Koch Foundation had a say in hiring and firing George Mason University professors

[TradeTheBeal!]

VCU Rules.

GooMoo drools.

[tshile]

In this thread liberals get mad they don’t have 100% control of every facet of every university 

[Larry]

2 minutes ago, tshile said:

In this thread liberals get mad they don’t have 100% control of every facet of every university 

 

Tell you what.  

 

You find a post in which someone says that.  

 

I'll find a post in which someone who claims he isn't a conservative attempts to excuse paid political manipulation of an educational institution by creating a straw man, and claiming the straw man said something.  

 

I believe the score is 0-1?   

 

[tshile]

I didn't excuse it. I pointed out it's been known to people who've paid attention to the economics wing. It's not an excuse.

 

But keep on keeping on Larry! 

[TradeTheBeal!]

Poor Tshile, he’s still have difficulty processing his emotions after that outrageously offensive comedian routine over the weekend.  We need to be gentle with him while he struggles to reassemble himself.

[tshile]

2 minutes ago, TryTheBeal! said:

Poor Tshile, he’s still have difficulty processing his emotions after that outrageously offensive comedian routine over the weekend.  We need to be gentle with him while he struggles to reassemble himself.

 

It's been an emotionally rough week. I keep going back and forth on whether to keep these oak trees or get rid of them and where to put the house, it's just all so draining

[No Excuses]

16 minutes ago, tshile said:

I didn't excuse it. I pointed out it's been known to people who've paid attention to the economics wing. It's not an excuse.

 

But keep on keeping on Larry! 

 

Well no **** it's been known that GMU was likely accepting donations from conservative groups in return for skewing departments towards an ideological bend. That's why a lawsuit was filed because Mason refused to disclose its relationship to the Koch Foundation and to what extent they had been influencing university decisions. 

 

Mason has consistently denied taking marching orders from the Koch Foundation and we now know that this is 100% false. And this is ultimately an issue that needs to be brought to public attention because there is a deliberate attempt in this country by these very same people to dramatically cut public funding for state schools.

 

[tshile]

If you do some basic google searching the links between Koch and Mercatus Center are all over the place, going back over a decade.

The Mercatus Center's site is pretty clear about what they are.

 

The AP article makes it pretty clear it's about the Mercatus Center.

 

Given the way some of you are acting I'm wondering if you even understand how these schools/centers/whatever operate within universities.

 

The entire economics department as GMU has been widely considered libertarian/conservative/"free market" nonsense for a long time. 

 

(not that I like any of that, I'm not really comfortable the way money influences universities in general, and this is just another example of it. it's just interesting the way some of you are acting about this, especially conflating it to the entire university which I haven't seen evidence of yet [doesn't mean it doesn't exist...])

 

(that being said, the law school stuff is new to me, but I don't know how new it is to people who are in the field. obviously they chose scalia's name for their ASSOL [lol] school, but until then I hadn't heard anything)

[No Excuses]

1 minute ago, tshile said:

If you do some basic google searching the links between Koch and Mercatus Center are all over the place, going back over a decade.

The Mercatus Center's site is pretty clear about what they are.

 

The AP article makes it pretty clear it's about the Mercatus Center.

 

Given the way some of you are acting I'm wondering if you even understand how these schools/centers/whatever operate within universities.

 

The entire economics department as GMU has been widely considered libertarian/conservative/"free market" nonsense for a long time. 

 

You are once again arguing with yourself. 

 

Everyone knew what was going on. Mason denied it. The lawsuit exposed how the donor-university relationship is working.

 

It is 100% complete and utter garbage that something like this is allowed to take place at public universities. And it is a threat to academic freedom at public schools around the country who are increasingly more and more cash strapped and in desperate need of funding.

 

I am sorry this concept is apparently really difficult for you to grasp.

[tshile]

1 minute ago, No Excuses said:

I am sorry this concept is apparently really difficult for you to grasp.

 

I get that your go to move right now is to be an asshole because you feel like you're sacred academic profession is under assault and you want to berate anyone who doesn't quickly jump to your side

 

but you know as well as I do there are different schools within the universities and funding is tricky and more complex than this bull**** you're pushing that everyone else is free of influence but here's GMU's econ wing actively working subvert the education system.

 

unless you, mr academic, wants to pretend you're clueless? i'm fine with that.

 

[PokerPacker]

1 hour ago, tshile said:

The economics department has had a reputation for being strangely in the free market nonsense for a while, and for the people aware of that this article is not a surprise. 

 

This is school of economics is admittedly a think tank.

I mean, they have a couple Nobel Prize winning economists.

[tshile]

Here's the AP article - https://apnews.com/0c87e4318bcc4eb9b8e69f9f54c7b889

 

The actually article.

 

What we have is conservatives using influence via funding to push someone through an academics admissions process.

 

Because I'm sure that doesn't go on every university everywhere every admissions period 

 

The real question is the hiring/firing of faculty, the reasons why, and what they owe their students in terms of being open and up front about what they are.

 

I have a hard time believe anyone goes to that Mercatus Center without understanding what it is.

 

The legal side I'm completely unsure of that, I don't know if they operate similar to the other schools.

[twa]

3 minutes ago, PokerPacker said:

I mean, they have a couple Nobel Prize winning economists.

 

The Koch's probably bought them for them. 

 

[Larry]

Just now, tshile said:

 

I get that your go to move right now is to be an asshole because you feel like you're sacred academic profession is under assault and you want to berate anyone who doesn't quickly jump to your side

 

 

Wow. Two invocations of the notion that liberals are 100% in charge of academia, and attack anybody who threatens their 100% control, in what, an hour or so?  

 

You really should exercise more caution before accusing other people of having a “go to move of being an ***hole”. Or at least glance at a mirror. 

[tshile]

6 minutes ago, PokerPacker said:

I mean, they have a couple Nobel Prize winning economists.

 

I'm not saying everyone there is a blithering idiot. They're not.

 

But they've been very libertarian which stands out.

 

Which in my mind is fine, as long as you're not misleading your students. Schools chase money. Money buys influence. It's just a question of what influence etc.

1 minute ago, Larry said:

 

Wow. Two invocations of the notion that liberals are 100% in charge of academia, and attack anybody who threatens their 100% control, in what, an hour or so?  

 

You really should exercise more caution before accusing other people of having a “go to move of being an ***hole”. Or at least glance at a mirror. 

Well the one was a joke, but you don't really do well with jokes so I just sort of moved on from it.

 

Thought I'd point that out before you got any further carried away with it.

 

You might want to add 'reading skills' to your list of things to brush up on, after jokes. Because I didn't say anything about liberals being 100% in control of everything in the post you quoted.

 

[tshile]

https://www.mercatus.org/board

 

It's not like they're hiding who they are at all.

 

Their entire website is full of "free market" capital stuff and lists Charles Koch as a member.

 

Although I find it funny they couldn't find a picture of him for the board listing. There's a million pictures of him on the internet and he's a major donor, you couldn't find 1?

 

[Larry]

2 minutes ago, tshile said:

 

What we have is conservatives using influence via funding to push someone through an academics admissions process.

 

Because I'm sure that doesn't go on every university everywhere every admissions period 

 

 

Now there I think you’ve made a perfectly valid point, and one I wanted to make, too. 

 

At least in fiction, the notion of somebody getting into college because Daddy donated a building is just accepted as the way reality works. Now MAYBE what happened here is one of those cases where it’s a matter of it happening to a greater degree than elsewhere. (But at least the parts I’ve seen quoted here, don’t outrage me). 

[No Excuses]

13 minutes ago, tshile said:

 

I get that your go to move right now is to be an asshole because you feel like you're sacred academic profession is under assault and you want to berate anyone who doesn't quickly jump to your side

 

but you know as well as I do there are different schools within the universities and funding is tricky and more complex than this bull**** you're pushing that everyone else is free of influence but here's GMU's econ wing actively working subvert the education system.

 

unless you, mr academic, wants to pretend you're clueless? i'm fine with that.

 

 

Do you sometimes enjoy just not reading and blabbering?

 

People knew exactly what is going on at Mason. No one is denying this.

 

Mason lied about it anyways until they were forced to reveal their relationship with the Koch's.

 

Yes, it's a pretty big issue as much as you want to deny it. This kind of influence creep is a very bad thing at public universities, especially when the Koch's continue to fund politicians at the state/local level who continuously vote in favor of cutting state school funding.

 

If this happens at a private university, who cares. It's not an attack on the academic profession as much as its a cynical assault on public schools to turn them into obedient little ****es for the wealthy donor class in this country that has already ****ed the political landscape to their liking.

[tshile]

3 minutes ago, No Excuses said:

 

Do you sometimes enjoy just not reading and blabbering?

 

People knew exactly what is going on at Mason.

 

Mason lied about it anyways until they were forced to reveal their relationship with the Koch's.

 

Mason lied about one of it's centers having influence of falcuty?

 

That's your outrage here, right?

 

That the clearly conservative/libertarian Mercatus School, an Econ wing of GMU, hired/fired falcuty that aligned with libertarian and conservative values? At the behest of their major liberatrian donors? A donor who's listed on the center's website as a board member?

 

The school who's mission statement is to find free-market solutions to meet regulatory goals for the purposes of removing regulations?

 

The libertarian school of GMU's economics department hired only libertarian-pushing staff?

 

And someone wrote an email that makes it clear they used their influence to push someone through the admissions process?

 

Just want to make sure I'm understanding your outrage here.

[Fresh8686]

I saw this article earlier today and thought of this thread... it's somewhat related.

https://www.edge.org/conversation/sabine_hossenfelder-looking-in-the-wrong-places

 

"The problems that I see in my own community worry me a lot. Not so much because I’m so terribly worried about quantum gravity. On a certain level, even though it’s my personal interest, I realize that for most of the people on the planet making progress in quantum gravity is not that terribly important. It worries me because I have to question how well science itself is working.
 

The problems that I was speaking about in my own community—that people work on certain topics just because the money is there, because it’s something that is popular and that their colleagues appreciate—are problems that almost certainly exist in most scientific communities. My extrapolation from my own field would tell me that I should be very skeptical about whatever comes out of the scientific community. And that’s not good. Clearly that’s not good.

 

I’ve been thinking for a lot of time how we could go about and try to solve these problems. It’s hard, but it’s necessary. We need science to solve the problems on this planet, problems that we have caused ourselves. For this we need science to work properly. First of all, to get this done will require that we understand better how science works. I find it ironic that we have models for how political systems work. We have voting models. We have certain understanding for how these things go about.

We also have a variety of models for the economic system and for the interaction with the political system. But we pretty much know nothing about the dynamics of knowledge discovery. We don’t know how the academic system works, for how people develop their ideas, for how these ideas get selected, for how these ideas proliferate. We don’t have any good understanding of how that works. That will be necessary to solve these problems. We will also have to get this knowledge about how science works closer to the people who do the science. To work in this field, you need to have an education for how knowledge discovery works and what it takes to make it work properly. And that is currently missing."

Like the author said above, this issue of funding and popularity contests creating short-tem horizon echo chambers is happening across many communities. In a larger sense, humanity needs to watch itself with it's money fixation. Everything in life has a pressure to it, a gravity in a way, that increases the more extreme the fixation. Eventually that fixation reaches a critical mass and so bends the other parts of life, that it destroys the whole, like a snake eating it's own tail... which is quite appropriate, since this is an appetite and security issue. Certain people don't just want more and more money, they are also more and more scared to lose it, once they have it. Greed and fear at extreme orders of magnitude that can unfortunately twist and break the whole ecosystem of human civilization. 

I'm not saying we're at that critical mass point, but we are heading in that direction because we don't put in the effort to counterbalance it. And even though we are not at that point of destruction, we are still losing so much when it comes to human potential, because people are choosing to leverage their disciplines for security and gain, rather than risk doing the real work that will take us to the next level.

[tshile]

just to be clear, i came from the engineering school where the influence wasn't liberal/conservative. the influence was DOD. political ideology didn't play much of a role in what we were doing. but DOD funding was big since we're so close to the pentagon and DOD throws a lot of money at a lot of things.

 

i couldn't give a **** about the rest of the university. i have no desire to defend the econ or law schools, i got nothing from them and have no dog in that fight. as i pointed out, the conservative influence was well known (and mocked) in the econ department, and the ASSOL stuff was mocked as well (though some alumni from that school seemed to be rather upset about the whole thing)

 

i just find the selective outrage about money influence in education hilarious. attach the name of Koch to anything and it's like hitting a beehive with a stick

 

 

 

[LadySkinsFan]

Which people are ignoring/not giving credence to the politicization of public schools and universities.

[tshile]

@No Excuses

 

Just so you know, i'm aware of the DeVos et all attack on public education and their attempts to take that money and funnel it into private schools. They're doing the same thing with hospitals too. I'm aware of it, and it is a problem.

 

I don't know that this is the same thing, at all. I think you might be conflating the two, and I think that's a mistake. I'm not entirely sure yet.

[LadySkinsFan]

Dual pronged effort.

[No Excuses]

 

8 minutes ago, tshile said:

@No Excuses

 

Just so you know, i'm aware of the DeVos et all attack on public education and their attempts to take that money and funnel it into private schools. They're doing the same thing with hospitals too. I'm aware of it, and it is a problem.

 

I don't know that this is the same thing, at all. I think you might be conflating the two, and I think that's a mistake. I'm not entirely sure yet.

 

It is pretty much the same thing. Public schools in many parts of the country are struggling pretty badly, and a huge reason for that is the push by conservative megadonors at the state level who back politicians hell bent on cutting higher education funding.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/10/midwestern-public-research-universities-funding/542889/

 

It is cynical as **** that they work towards cutting school budgets, yet are using their money to buy influence at them through donations. None of this ends with an outcome that is at the core of public school missions: serving in the best interest of its people. They become playgrounds for the wealthy and influential to shove their bullcrap down everyone's throats.