Koch's buying off FSU department to spew climate denialist crap

[n2doc]

Students at Florida State University are telling Charles Koch to stop compromising academic integrity with multimillion dollar grants that come with strings attached.

You may recall: back in 2011, two Florida State University (FSU) professors revealed that the Charles Koch Foundation was given inappropriate control over the professor hiring process in the economics department, where millions of dollars were granted from the Kansas billionaire. Three years later, the case still isn’t closed on this corporate manipulation of university functions. The FSU students write:

Our university’s academic integrity has already been compromised from the influence of high-dollar donors like Koch, who managed to assume inappropriate control over our economics department’s curriculum and hiring process per an agreement signed in 2008. Three years have passed since FSU professors exposed Koch’s financial grip over our school and a committee of faculty senators formally rejected several stipulations of the agreement. Yet, it is clear that the administration refuses to act to appropriately limit outside influence on FSU’s educational operations.

A new agreement with Koch, signed by both ex-President Barron and current Interim President Garnett Stokes, still contains many provisions from the original agreement that were explicitly rejected by the faculty senators who reviewed it. Barron himself stated that the initial agreement “did provide the opportunity for outside influence” from Koch. This leads us to question whether the new agreement leaves that influence intact.

The op-ed focuses on the departure of Eric Barron, who is transitioning into the president’s office at Penn State University after serving as president of Florida State University.

Mr. Barron is being celebrated for his expertise in climate science as he cycles into his new position at Penn State (which also gets money from Charles Koch).

more

http://greenpeaceblogs.org/2014/04/09/florida-students-charles-koch-stop-messing-academic-integrity/

[JPZenger]

1. Take a look too at their role at George Mason University, a public u. in Va.

[MindMover]

2. kr...nt

[Nay]

3. In my day (the 70's), the Kochs would have been run off by the students, the

teachers, AND the administrators of the school in the blink of an eye. They would have been reviled and savaged in the newspapers for trying to buy off the truth.


I'm glad the students still know what they're doing....

[Junkdrawer]

4. The corrupting role of corporate money in Education and Science is still little appreciated...

As usual, we'll have to wait until it hits absurd extremes before it's widely noticed, much less addressed.