It is one thing to expose people for their donations…and quite another to show that such donations resulted in the hiring of unworthy teachers and researchers.
The UnKochMyCampus movement has been big news lately, mostly because old Koch Foundation’s agreements with George Mason University were disclosed. Don Boudreaux has written a forceful note on the subject. Don basically asks the Kochs’ challengers to measure their allegations against the benchmark of academic standards. This is a sensible request: it is one thing to expose people for their donations (wait a minute, didn’t we want rich people to donate to universities?), and quite another to prove that such donations resulted in the hiring of unworthy teachers and researchers.
The New York Times has devoted a long piece to the issue, aiming to explain what the Kochs “got for their money”.
In that piece we read that the Kochs’ donations to campuses are “estimated at nearly $150 million from 2005 to 2015, benefiting more than 300 schools”.
This would mean an average of $500,000 per school over 10 years.
If “an estimated $50 million of that went to George Mason” (or so the article writes), this would mean that the other schools received an average of $334,000 over ten years; that is a staggering $33,400 a year per school.
Just a quick comparison. In the social sciences, the average ERC grant in Europe is 1.5 million euros over five years. It’s true that that is to finance research, with an explicit prohibition of using the money to hire faculties. But that comes, nonetheless, with the possibility of hiring research assistants and younger scholars, who are just starting to make their waves in academia.
Sure this is not a comparison we can make much of. But it’s just to give you a sense of the magnitude. It is also perhaps worth noting that, where GMU is concerned, total assets were $1.6 billion in 2017 and GMU’s 2018 total budget is projected to be $1.0 billion. So, assuming that the GMU budget has been steadily rising, its total over those 10 years was likely over $5 billion. Let’s see: $50 million is 1% of $5 billion. Is that significant? Yes. Is it huge? Not really. Like the Kochs or hate them, it doesn’t seem they’re committing so many resources that the academic establishment should be worried that it has been hijacked.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
May 12 2018 at 11:05am
Well thought out. Transparency is always the best policy and I think the President of GMU handled this pretty well. There is a long history of industrialists funding higher education in America and there is nothing wrong with the Koch brothers or their company funding. I don’t know whether the money discussed includes funding of the Mercatus Center which is affiliated with GMU but is its own separate entity for tax purposes. None the less, the Center has an admirable ‘Independence of Research’ policy.
As an aside, I was on a panel and gave a talk many years ago at the National Institutes of Health where issues related to industry support of basic research. Again this is something where there is a long history (du Pont had an interesting agreement with Notre Dame back in the early 1930s when they were exploring polymer science).
Quite Likely
May 12 2018 at 11:37am
Is comparing the size of a bribe to the net worth of the recipient really the way to think about whether there’s any undue influence?
Mark Z
May 12 2018 at 3:10pm
“Is comparing the size of a bribe to the net worth of the recipient really the way to think about whether there’s any undue influence?”
In what way is donating money to fund academic research a bribe?
Fazal Majid
May 12 2018 at 10:40pm
It’s always amusing to watch the rhetorical contortions of economists when they claim incentives motivate everyone except themselves.
Mark Bahner
May 14 2018 at 12:30am
Incentives matter. Amounts of incentives matter. That seems to be the whole point of the post.
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