In early April, David Rapach told administrators at St. Louis University in Missouri that he intended to renounce the prestigious John Simon Endowed Chair in Economics, a position he’d held for five years.
The reason? The university’s decision in August 2018 to accept a $50 million donation from St. Louis billionaire Rex Sinquefield, a donation that Rapach and many of his colleagues say violates faculty governance and exerts undue influence over academic matters, including hiring.
“Colleges and universities are supposed to promote public good. This is compromised when donors are given undue influence to promote the interests of financial elites. My deepest concern is that we’ll see the pernicious effects of their outsized influence on our social institutions.”
At issue is the creation of the Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research and the appointment of Mike Podgursky, a Sinquefield ally, as the center’s director at the donor’s request. St. Louis University also gave Sinquefield final approval over the disbursement of funds from the donation, including oversight of faculty research grants. Rapach calls this “a flagrant breach of academic norms.”
Rapach is the highest-profile academic to leave a post in protest of undue donor influence, but he is not the only faculty member who has sounded an alarm over donor attempts to control curricula, hiring, and administrative decision-making.
Since 2014, a national network called UnKoch My Campus has worked to address these increasingly pressing issues. Their work has brought public attention to the incursions into campus life made by deep-pocketed financiers such as Charles Koch, the late David Koch, Rex Sinquefield, and other like-minded libertarians and conservatives.
Sinquefield, far less well-known than the Koch family, nonetheless caught the attention of UnKoch activists after his gift was announced. And for good reason.
Dubbed the “Tyrannosaurus Rex of state politics” by governing.com, Sinquefield has long donated massive amounts of money to local Missouri candidates, $28 million between 2008 and 2013 alone in support of conservative efforts to enter public office. The seventy-five-year-old co-founder of Diversional Fund Advisors also helped create the libertarian Show-Me Institute in 2005 “to promote free markets and individual liberty” and make the state a place “where all Missourians are free from dependence on government.”
Although his actual net worth is unknown, Sinquefield’s willingness to spend money on issues and organizations he believes in, has given him a massive amount of clout. The reason is simple: UnKoch researchers found that since the 2008 recession, federal grants to two- and four-year colleges have been slashed by more than $7 billion, leading to massive shortfalls and pushing colleges to court wealthy donors.
In fact, virtually every college has felt the pinch: A year before Sinquefield’s donation was announced, for example, SLU faced a $16 million deficit.
This has given donors like Sinquefield and the Kochs easy entry into academe and their reach is extensive: Since 2018, several Koch charities, including the Charles Koch Foundation and the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation, have donated more than $200 million to 300 colleges and universities to support 800-plus faculty positions at public and private colleges throughout the United States.
These gifts likely sound great--that is, until you read the fine print and discover that almost all come with strings attached. But while most cash-strapped institutions have capitulated to donor demands, this may be changing as people like David Rapach step forward.
Rapach is not alone in taking a stand against donor influence in academia. At George Mason University, Bethany Letiecq, an associate professor of human development and family science, disaffiliated from the university’s Institute for Immigrant Research in 2019 after it accepted $92,000 from the Koch family.
Letiecq is also president of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors, and is a member of the faculty senate. Thanks to a simultaneous student-directed organizing campaign against taking Koch money, after Letiecq’s action six additional faculty members—a quarter of the total—also disaffiliated from the Institute.
“Some money is too dark and dirty to pursue,” a colleague of Letiecq's, who asked to withhold his name, wrote in his resignation letter. “The Kochs have a long history at [George Mason University] and at other campuses of interfering with academic freedom, influencing policy matters, lobbying higher education and the judiciary in ways I don’t think are okay.” What’s more, he stressed that the policy agenda of the Charles Koch Foundation and its affiliates “are very anti-immigrant, anti-human rights, and not at all kind or helpful for people in poverty.”
These actions followed on the heels of several earlier acts to oppose donor reach. In 2016, the conservative Beacon Hill Institute separated from Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts, after its acceptance of Koch money was revealed by campus activists. Two years later, Ohio’s University of Dayton agreed that it would no longer accept Koch dollars because of excessive donor demands.
“Almost all of the higher education programs the Koch Foundations fund cleave to the brothers’ philosophy of promoting free markets and laissez-faire capitalism in the United States,” Dave Levinthal wrote in Time in 2015.
In the five years since, the Kochs have continued to exert their financial muscle. What’s more, they have drawn in like-minded allies like Rex Sinquefield as major donors, which brings us back to David Rapach.
“When the Sinquefield gift was first announced, and I learned more about the special privileges being given to him, I was shocked, apoplectic actually,” Rapach says. “I reached out to my colleagues, and we wrote a widely circulated memo pointing out the obvious infringement of academic integrity that this represented.”
Shortly thereafter, the matter was taken up by the St. Louis University faculty senate, which formed an ad hoc committee to investigate the issue. The committee was charged with writing a report that would be sent to its Board of Trustees and administrators, outlining the potential impact of the grant on independent scholarship and teaching.
Rapach says he urged the committee to request that the Board not give the Sinquefield Center for Research “total control” over the allocation of research funding, but it chose not to follow his recommendations.
“Colleges and universities are supposed to promote public good,” Rapach says. “This is compromised when donors are given undue influence to promote the interests of financial elites. My deepest concern is that we’ll see the pernicious effects of their outsized influence on our social institutions.”
Although Rapach is presently on leave from St. Louis University and will be a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis through 2021, he and many of his colleagues are continuing to work with UnKoch My Campus.
The challenge, he concedes, is gargantuan, but UnKoch My Campus’s Campaigns Director Samantha Parsons believes that Rapach’s action will inspire others to speak out and organize opposition to donors like Sinquefield who want to control what is taught and by whom. (A petition in support of Rapach is available at unkochmycampus.org.)
“Professor Rapach’s actions should serve as a model for faculty who have the courage and positional power to protest donor influence on campus,” Parsons says. “His leadership demonstrates the power of individual actions, while calling the public’s attention to the kinds of actions that colleges and universities should be taking themselves.”