Saturday, October 6, 2018

Rival foundations funding the UnKoch movement

Deep-Pocketed Donors Behind Campus Anti-Koch Movement - Washington Free Beacon - Lachlan Markay:

November 2, 2015 - "Liberal foundations financing a nonprofit news venture that is reporting on donations made by the Koch Brothers to colleges are also financing on-campus groups protesting the Kochs’ donations. The same foundations have also spent billions backing educational initiatives of their own that frequently promote left-wing policy agendas....

"The Center for Public Integrity [CPI] ... [has] detailed the Kochs’ grants to colleges and universities, that, reporter Dave Levinthal wrote, are 'now a critical part of their broader campaign to infuse politics and government with free-market principles.' According to Levinthal, Koch-backed foundations provided $19.3 million in funding for colleges and universities in 2013, a $6.6 million increase over 2012. 'Funding — as well as pushback against it — is increasing," he wrote.

"One group committed to such 'pushback' is UnKoch My Campus, which immediately picked up on and promoted CPI’s story. Its publication came just days before UnKoch’s planned 'day of action' ... to protest what it says is the Kochs’ undue influence on the curricula and staffing of those programs.... UnKoch, as its name suggests, is focused exclusively on the influence of conservative and libertarian university donors....

"UnKoch’s views reflect those of the groups backing the campaign: environmental giant Greenpeace; Forecast the Facts, a climate-focused project of the left-wing Citizen Engagement Lab; the Center for Media and Democracy, another nonprofit news venture; and the American Federation of Teachers.

"Those groups receive significant funding from the same foundations that finance CPI’s reporting. The Park Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Foundation for an Open Society have all granted money to CPI and at least one of the groups behind the UnKoch effort.

"These groups are also heavily involved in education philanthropy: Together, those six foundations have doled out more than $4.2 billion in related grants, including nearly $270 million in 2013, according to the nonprofit research service Foundation Search....

"Levinthal followed up his reporting with a story detailing the work of six foundations with ties to the Kochs. Together, the foundations reported net assets of $463 million in 2013. In comparison, the six aforementioned foundations backing CPI and the groups behind UnKoch reported combined net assets in 2013 of more than $31 billion....

"Levinthal writes that the Kochs’ giving will 'build a "talent pipeline" of libertarian-minded students.' Little attention is paid to the fact that this is exactly what the foundations backing CPI and the groups behind UnKoch are also trying to do....

"UnKoch referred questions about its activities to Greenpeace spokesman Connor Gibson, who rejected any parity between university donations from the Kochs and similarly ideological donors on the left.... Gibson for the most part declined to directly address questions about the UnKoch effort, and demanded to know whether the Washington Free Beacon is 'contracted to write defenses of [the Kochs] every time another scandal breaks.'"

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