Ayn Rand U? Rich Conservatives -- Not Just the Kochs -- Buying Up Professors and Influence on Campus

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Daniel Denvir

Ayn Rand U? Rich Conservatives -- Not Just the Kochs -- Buying Up Professors and Influence on Campus
Conservative activists have a good-cop, bad-cop approach to the university. In either case, the same right-wing foundations pay the bill.

May 24, 2011 |


These days, rich conservatives want a lot more than their names on university buildings in exchange for big donations. The Koch brothers recently endowed two economics professorships at Florida State University in exchange for a say over faculty hires. Banker John Allison, long-time head of BB&T, has donated to 60 universities in exchange for their agreeing to teach Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged--some agreements even include the outrageous stipulation that the professor teaching the course “have a positive interest in and be well versed in Objectivism.”

The economic crisis has opened American universities to ever more brazen--and at times decidedly strange--attacks on the hallowed principle of academic freedom. Conservative efforts to shape hearts and minds on campus, however, are far from new. Like anything in a capitalist society, academia is a place where people with money fight for power, and take their advantage where they can. Indeed, the effort to mold higher education--which the Right has long caricatured as a hotbed of revolutionary agitation--in the image of the establishment has been central to the rise of modern conservatism.

“Conservatives have been funding such efforts for a while, but usually fairly quietly and without the rough touch of the Koch brothers,” says David Farber, a professor of history at Temple University and author of The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism.

Inside academia and out, the conservative movement has prioritized young people and intellectuals since the 1964 defeat of Barry Goldwater and the 1968 youth rebellion, endowing professorships alongside a plethora of on-message think tanks. (The arms manufacturer John Olin, 78, was particularly appalled by the 1969 occupation of the student union at his alma mater, Cornell, by armed black activists.) ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/151066/ayn_rand_u_rich_conservatives_--_not_just_the_kochs_--_buying_up_professors_and_influence_on_campus/

[nxylas]

1. No doubt they'll paint it as a corrective to radical Marxism on campus

Just as Fox News is supposed to balance out alleged liberal bias in the media.

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. What happened? Was taking over private schools too expensive for them?

[DirkGently]

3. The rich have decided that if reality has a liberal bias, they'll just put it under new management.

[Mopar151]

4. They need a new bunch of toadies and sycophants

Not more of those smartass kids who think too much.

[JohnWxy]

5. important post. EXXON MOBIL granted $100 million to Stanford Univ - with the stipulation that

Exxon would have a seat on the committee that decided which research projects got funded with that grant money.

BP gave a grant of $450 million to University of California, Berkeley.

A hundred million dollars or so buys a lot of influence.