With patience, Kochs sow conservatism on campuses
    
Two Wellesley College students took the stage here at the Koch brothers’ winter retreat and described a lefty campus hostile to the conservative and libertarian ideas that the Kochs and their wealthy allies hold dear.

“It is considered polite not to challenge authority,” said Kaila Webb, a Wellesley sophomore speaking to a gathering of roughly 550 Koch donors who pay at least $100,000 a year to be here.

Margaret Flynn Sapia, a Wellesley junior, added that a “hazardous political climate” prevents students from voicing conservative views.

Wellesley this week became the poster child for liberal intolerance, held up by the arch-conservative activist network as an example of how America’s higher education system is deeply flawed. And the billionaire Kochs are offering a solution: Wellesley, and other liberal colleges, can be reshaped by funneling money to choice projects within those institutions that are in synch with the Kochs and their allies’ broader libertarian philosophy that, among other aspects, promotes small government and unencumbered markets.

Charles Koch, with an estimated net worth of $49 billion, has led the way by ramping up campus spending from his personal foundation to $100 million a year in 2017, from about $35 million in 2014, according to figures provided by the Charles Koch Foundation. The money underwrote projects at roughly 350 colleges and universities last year.

At Wellesley, the Charles Koch Foundation supports the Freedom Project, an academic hub that highlights speakers challenging the conventional wisdom on issues, including conservative thinkers.

“Many folks are asking if higher education in this country is having a positive impact on the direction of this country,” said John Hardin, the director of university relations at the Charles Koch Foundation, said before bringing the Wellesley students on stage to discuss the Koch-funded Freedom Project, which is aimed at — from the Kochs’ perspective — improving campus culture.

“These are all programs for students that are modeling how civil discourse can work,” he told reporters earlier. “That can give students a chance to see how the collision of ideas is absolutely fundamental.”

But critics say there’s reason to be suspicious of these initiatives. The Kochs have a history of trying to attach conditions to their donations. At Florida State University, the Kochs tried to control the curriculum and some hiring in the economics department in exchange for giving millions of dollars, according to the Center for Public Integrity, which has closely tracked Koch giving.

They’ve also used their education dollars to elevate climate-change deniers, including Willie Soon, a solar researcher at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who called predictions of rising oceans “crazy.” That belief puts him at odds with most scientists.

Over the weekend the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which describes itself as “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas,” was specifically credited with doing the academic work to support the $1.5 trillion tax cut passed in December. It has benefited from tens of millions of dollars from Koch groups.

“That research turned out to be absolutely essential to cut through the propaganda that was put out by the cronies and the special interests who were opposing reform,” said Brian Hooks, the Seminar Network co-chairman and former Mercatus executive director, addressing donors over the weekend.

Wellesley served a different role in the conversation: As a stand-in for liberal intolerance, it was meant to galvanize donors to take matters into their own hands, and try to tilt the collegiate discourse toward the right.

Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, said that the higher education world has been watching closely. “The Kochs have been an increasingly visible force on college campuses at a time when there is widespread criticism by conservative voices that higher education promotes progressive liberal causes,” Pasquerella said.

She said the “concern” for many is whether the Kochs are trying to control curriculum and faculty hiring.

At Wellesley, the Kochs don’t have influence over picking teaching fellows or speakers. Still, their ideological bent raises concerns from those who pay close attention to university giving.

“It is corrosive,” said Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, who is known for finding ways of connecting donors with projects that align with their interests. “Using money as an ideological club is a fact of life, but it’s an unpleasant one. It’s a nasty fact of life that you have to accept is nasty.”

But Botstein said that elite colleges like Wellesley are adept at sidestepping the more extreme inclinations or intentions of donors, and tend to find ways to accept large gifts and spend the money in ways that don’t undermine the institution.

Sofiya Cabalquinto, a spokeswoman for Wellesley College, said the Koch money is overseen by the college. “The Freedom Project is just one of many ways in which Wellesley students engage in a diversity of political viewpoints and participate in critical thinking and debate,” she said.

The project at Wellesley started when Thomas Cushman, a sociology professor at the college, applied to the Kochs for a grant to bring speakers to campus. He started with $10,000. Seeding individual professors or departments with money is a common strategy for the Kochs, who encourage professors to apply directly for grants.

At Wellesley, the project has been focused on free speech. “People think we have some kind of right-wing agenda going on,” Cushman said in an interview. “But it’s not that at all. I don’t get involved in their electoral projects at all.”

But the Koch Foundation liked what they saw Cushman doing at Wellesley, and Cushman wanted a more ambitious program — so in 2016 the Charles Koch Foundation gave him a $1 million grant to supersize the project.

The Kochs also helped persuade two other donors with ties to the college, George and Nancy Records, to join their effort instead of giving unrestricted money to the college. “They had a check ready to go — they hit the pause button,” Hardin told donors.

In the end the Recordses also gave $1 million to the Freedom Project. “We increased the amount we were planning to give to meet the program’s needs, and have been happy to learn how much students value it,” said George Records, the former chairman of the Midland Group in Oklahoma, in a statement e-mailed to the Globe.

Wellesley’s Freedom Project now includes up to 24 student fellows who apply to be part of it, and funds postdoctoral fellows to do research and teach some classes at the college.

Speakers have included Columbia University’s Mark Lilla, who is critical of identity politics, and Northwestern University’s Laura Kipnis, who has questioned policies barring sexual relationships between students and teachers at colleges and universities. And the program welcomed libertarian author Charles Murray, who was shouted down during a speech at Middlebury College.

Cushman said there have been some protests to his program at Wellesley, but that he also has a well of support. He said he has control over the program and isn’t beholden to donors.

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Inside a Public School Social Justice Factory

The city of Edina has changed the way it approaches public education, putting social justice above learning. The results will shock you.

For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the state’s school districts. Edina is an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and students increasingly fear bullying and persecution.

The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the “All for All” strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to “racial equity.”

“Equity” in this context does not mean “equality” or “fairness.” It means racial identity politics—an ideology that blames minority students’ academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s color-blind ideal, and focuses on uprooting “white privilege.”

The Edina school district’s All for All plan mandated that henceforth “all teaching and learning experiences” would be viewed through the “lens of racial equity,” and that only “racially conscious” teachers and administrators should be hired. District leaders assured parents this would reduce Edina’s racial achievement gap, which they attributed to “barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.”

As a result, the school system’s obsession with “white privilege” now begins in kindergarten. At Edina’s Highlands Elementary School, for example, K-2 students participate in the Melanin Project. The children trace their hands, color them to reflect their skin tone, and place the cut-outs on a poster reading, “Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone elses!-[sic] Everyone is special!”

Highlands Elementary’s new “racially conscious” elementary school principal runs a blog for the school’s community. On it, she approvingly posted pictures of Black Lives Matter propaganda and rainbow gay-pride flags—along with a picture of protesters holding a banner proclaiming “Gay Marriage Is Our Right.” On a more age-appropriate post, she recommended an A-B-C book for small children entitled A is for Activist. (Peruse the book and you find all sorts of solid-gold: “F is for Feminist,” “C is for…Creative Counter to Corporate Vultures,” and “T is for Trans.”)

At Edina High School, the equity agenda is the leading edge of a full-scale ideological reeducation campaign. A course description of an 11th-grade U.S. Literature and Composition course puts it this way: “By the end of the year, you will have . . . learned how to apply marxist [sic], feminist, post-colonial [and] psychoanalytical . . .lenses to literature.”

The primary vehicle in the indoctrination effort is a year-long English course—required of all 10th-graders—that centers, not on reading literature and enhancing writing skills, but on the politicized themes of “Colonization,” “Immigration” and “Social Constructions of Race, Class and Gender.”

One student characterized the course this way on the “Rate My Teachers” website: “This class should be renamed . . . ‘Why white males are bad, and how oppressive they are.’”

Increasingly, families who are serious about education are leaving the Edina schools. For example, Orlando Flores and his wife pulled their son—an academic superstar—out of Edina High School in his senior year to escape its hyper-political environment.

Flores, who fled a Marxist regime in Nicaragua as a child, had this to say: “Years ago, we fled Communism to escape indoctrination, absolutist thinking and restrictions on our freedom of speech. If we see these traits in our schools in America, we must speak out and oppose it.”

Flores says that when his son was at Edina High, teachers routinely pushed politicians and political positions they favored, shamed and browbeat students with dissenting views, and forced them to defend themselves against baseless allegations of racism. According to his son, he says, classroom discussions were often “one-sided indoctrination sessions,” and students feared their grades would be penalized if they spoke out.

The final straw for the Flores family occurred when an English teacher subjected their son and a classmate to a lengthy, humiliating and ideologically charged grilling—unlike that faced by other students—after the boys made a presentation with which she disagreed following racially-charged incidents in Ferguson, Missouri.

When Flores’ son requested an apology, school authorities indignantly took the teacher’s side, says Flores. Fearing retaliation, the boy asked to transfer to another English class. There, a student teacher informed the class they would not be reading classic books because “dead white men are boring,” according to Flores.

Flores believes that “Race and racism should be discussed” at school. But “relentlessly obsessing about race—pretending it’s the only thing that matters—is counterproductive and harmful to everyone,” he says.

Like Edina students, the district’s faculty and staff must submit to racial equity re-education.

One such mandatory session for school bus drivers is illustrative. The widow of a bus driver who had been required to attend the training sent the entire 25-page instructional curriculum to Center of the American Experiment, where I am a senior policy fellow.

The training session was entitled “Edina School DIstrict Equity and Racial Justice Training: Moving from a Diversity to a Social Justice Lens.” In it, trainers instructed bus drivers that “dismantling white privilege” is “the core of our work as white folks,” and that working for the Edina schools requires “a major paradigm shift in the thinking of white people.” Drivers were exhorted to confess their racial guilt, and embrace the district’s “equity” ideology.

The result of all of this? Four years into the Edina schools’ equity crusade, black students’ test scores continue to disappoint. There’s been a single positive point of data: Black students’ reading scores—all ages, all grades—have slightly increased, from 45.5 percent proficiency in 2014 to 46.4 percent proficiency in 2017.

But other than that, the news is all bad. Black students “on track for success” in reading decreased from 48.1 percent in 2014 to 44.9 percent in 2017. Math scores decreased from 49.6 percent proficiency in 2014 to 47.4 percent in 2017. Black students “on track for success” in math decreased from 51.4 percent in 2014 to 44.7 percent in 2017.

The drop was most notable at the high school level. Math scores for black students in 11th grade at Edina Senior High dropped from 31 percent proficiency in 2014 to 14.6 percent in 2017. In reading, scores for black students in 10th grade at Edina Senior High dropped from 51.7 percent proficiency in 2014 to 40 percent in 2017.

* * *

Recently, conservative students at Edina High School filed a federal lawsuit, claiming the district has violated its members’ rights of free speech and association.

The suit grew out of events following a Veteran’s Day assembly in the high school gym on November 9, 2017. There, a group of veterans spoke about their military service, and the school band played the National Anthem and Taps. During the music, some black students “protested” by refusing to stand, slouching by the bleachers, talking loudly, and blaring music on their cell phones.

Members of the school’s unofficial Young Conservatives Club (YCC) responded by criticizing the protesters’ behavior, at school and on social media. In response, the protesters and their allies harassed the conservative students, with groups “as large as 30 students . . . daily surrounding club members and threatening to injure them if they did not change their political views,” according to the lawsuit complaint. In addition, a group styling itself the “Edina High School Anti-Fascists” (you have to see the group’s Twitter feed to believe it) posted a threatening YouTube video aimed at the YCC, which declared, “[W]e will not stop until every tentacle of your evil monstrosity is sliced off at the nerve.”

When the conservative students complained, the school’s principal “responded to their security concerns by saying that [they had] brought it upon themselves by criticizing the protests” at the Veterans Day program, according to the complaint.

The principal disbanded the YCC after pressuring its president to show him texts its members had sent one another about these incidents on the club’s private GroupMe. Yet school authorities apparently took no disciplinary action against the protesters and other students who had threatened and harassed YCC members.

The Edina Public Schools’ “policies suggest that ‘all are welcome here,’” the complaint asserts, “but what EPS really means is that all are welcome except conservatives.”

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Academics Accuse Donk bigshot of Repeating Falsehoods About Halloween Costume Scandal

One of the professors at the center of the 2015 Yale Halloween costume controversy, who publicly accused the former governor of Vermont and Democratic leader, Howard Dean of dishonesty for his remarks at a free speech panel held at an Ohio college last year, is finding support among other prominent academics.

Nicholas Christakis, a physician and sociology professor at Yale University, slammed the former Democratic National Committee Chair for spreading “off-base and reckless” misinformation about him and his wife at the “Free speech, Civil Discourse” conference at Kenyon College in a series of tweets.

“We have maintained a policy of near silence for over two years—but Dean is a former presidential candidate in the U.S.A. and a former governor,” Christakis told Quillette. “The great amount of evidence that is nevertheless in the public record is one of the reasons that I think it is so important to make the effort to get the facts right if people are going to make public statements.”

Steven Pinker, who shared the stage with Dean at the conference in September, agreed with Christakis’ complaints. The Harvard cognitive scientist told Quillette that Dean indeed got some of his information “badly wrong.”

“Without a commitment to accuracy, debate becomes demagoguery and intimidation, rather than a way to ascertain reality and promote defensible policies,” Pinker said. “Certainly, the Left cannot honestly criticize the mendacity of Donald Trump while allowing fabrications and distortions such as those of Howard Dean to stand uncorrected.”

The Harvard professor recently fell victim to a misinformation campaign when a video clip of him speaking at a Harvard panel about the alt-right was lifted out of context and misrepresented by activists. Pinker says the personal cost to him was ultimately minor but for dissident academics who are untenured or without reputation, “the costs could be severe.”

At the conference on free speech at Kenyon College, organized by the Center for the Study of American Democracy, Dean faulted Erika Christakis, wife of Nicholas Christakis and a former Yale childhood development instructor and administrator, for offending students by writing a letter suggesting that they should not need institutional policing of Halloween costumes. Nicholas Christakis took particular issue with Dean’s characterization of her letter, originally written in response to guidelines issued by Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee when Dean summarized it as saying “political correctness is B.S.” and “don’t be a snowflake.”

“If [Dean] did read the Christakis Halloween costume letter and concluded that its main thrust was that political correctness was B.S., he still lacks the capacity to grasp not even particularly complex arguments,” Heather Mac Donald, a conservative commentator and writer who was on the panel, told Quillette. “[Erika’s] point, carefully couched with concerns for allegedly marginalized students, was that experimentation and alleged transgression—as if a costume is truly transgressive—is part of the process of growing up and that the adults should stop trying to overregulate student behavior. Hers was an argument based on her work in child development.”

The infamous Halloween cultural appropriation controversy occurred in October 2015 at Yale, where hundreds of students and faculty protested Erika Christakis’ email, accusing her of fostering racist violence and demanding her firing. The firestorm culminated in an aggressive student confrontation with Nicholas Christakis, which was caught on video and subsequently went viral. Both Nicholas and Erika later resigned from their administrative roles as college masters (Yale has now changed that administrative title to “head of college” for sensitivity reasons).

At the panel discussion, Dean blamed the Christakis couple for inciting the campus backlash and welcomed their resignations. While he conceded that the couple has a right to say what they want, he emphasized that “there are consequences to free speech.”

“Being the leader of the college, means you are the students’ advocate,” Dean said. “If you then choose to debunk what one group thought was protective, you have lost your purpose to having that job.”

Heather Mac Donald pushed back against Dean’s characterization of the Yale controversy on stage at the time and so continues to question if he even read Erika Christakis’ letter. I made repeated attempts to contact Howard Dean for comment, specifically to inquire if he read Erika Christakis’ letter before the conference.

I did not receive a response.

Mac Donald continued: “His claim that the Christakis’s deserved to lose their job on the basis of the innocuous, cautious, Halloween memo is a terrifying demonstration of how far campus intolerance has infected the non-academic world. If the Howard Deans of the world seize more political power, the core bedrock of American society—free speech—will disintegrate.”

Two years on from the Yale Halloween costume scandal, Nicholas Christakis is still fascinated at how he and his wife are characterized depending on the politics of the person or group. “One of the most surprising things to me about our experiences at Yale in 2015 has been the way that both the Left and the Right, and various actors both locally and nationally, have so overlooked and distorted—often willfully, I would say—basic facts about what happened.”

Heather Mac Donald echoed Christakis’ concern and issued a warning about the consequences of perpetuating misinformation based on partisan ideology: “If opponents in the ideological divide refuse to honestly characterize their opponents’ arguments, but instead deal with ignorant caricatures, there is no hope of ever bridging those divides and arriving at some common truth or mode of respectful coexistence.”

Other academics, some who were embroiled in similar controversies with social justice activists, expressed support for the Christakis couple on social media.

Bret Weinstein, a former Evergreen State College biology professor who resigned after a series of highly publicized campus protests last year, wrote two hypotheses about the ordeal on Twitter. Weinstein predicted that if Dean “was accidentally repeating falsehoods,” then on the “discovery of the truth, he will apologize fully and publicly.” His second hypothesis states that if the “falsehoods were deliberate,” then there will be “silence.”

Nicholas Christakis says he has not heard from Howard Dean.

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