Grant Bianco via Creative Commons
Groups of student protesters clashing over a visit from Candace Owens at Penn College.
According to Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War, there were only sixty instances of conservative and libertarian speech being curtailed at 4,583 U.S. colleges between 2016 and 2018.
Nonetheless, Fox News and other rightwing media outlets—including Breitbart, The Washington Examiner, The College Fix, The Daily Wire, and The Daily Caller—have reported on free speech suppression so often that its supposed pervasiveness has taken on the gravitas of truth. But, as Free Speech and Koch Money authors Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola report, “much of the contemporary outrage over a full-blown, nationwide campus free speech crisis has been manufactured as part of a well-funded and well-organized political strategy.”
“They are creating a whole academic ecosystem in which donor-preferred ideas can thrive.”
This orchestration involves a tightly controlled network of conservative businesspeople, philanthropists, state and federal lawmakers, and academics, whose policy decisions, speeches, and teachings favor unfettered capitalism and the undermining of multiculturalism, anti-racist activism, public education, environmental regulation, labor rights, and queer liberation.
The goal of these rightwing activists, the authors explain, is nothing short of a “complete transformation of U.S. society” to promote “individual freedom” and a skewed notion of free speech that elevates pro-free market talking points over the protection of our air, water, and ability to parse ideas. At the helm is Koch Industries, a private, multinational conglomerate which owns a whole slew of companies specializing in paper, fertilizer, oil, and biofuels. They are joined in their mission by an array of wealthy conservative and libertarian donors who dig deep to fund the causes they believe in.
These once-disparate capitalists are part of several unified organizations—DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund are the most well-known—that focus on funding education as a way to prime the next generation’s pump and ensure that pro-business momentum continues far into the future.
This is not a new idea. In fact, Wilson and Kamola state that as early as 1971, Lewis F. Powell Jr., later a Nixon-appointed Supreme Court justice, put forward the idea that conservatives should pressure colleges and universities for “the right to be heard.” Powell was convinced that the academy would capitulate, fearful that refusing to do so would tar them as bastions of the left, rather than institutions open to diverse discourse.
He was right. In the fifty years since Powell’s declaration, conservative students have created numerous groups—typically receiving both college and Koch-backed funding—and have worked in tandem to bring conservative lightning rods such as Heather MacDonald, Charles Murray, Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, and Milo Yiannopoulis, to campuses across the country.
“Between 2005 and 2017, Koch family foundations spent more than $256 million on donations to colleges and universities,” Wilson and Kamola write. Unsurprisingly, cash-strapped programs have chomped at the bit to get these dollars, and in many cases, have even agreed to give financiers control over course content and hiring. “Economic freedom and individual liberty became the rallying cry of this reactionary politics,” they write.
In addition to the funding of campus organizations promoting conservative and libertarian ideas, the “Kochtopus” has constructed a smear machine to denounce professors who promote progressive ideas. Campus Reform, a rightwing student news outlet, pays students to report on instructors who promote left-leaning views that the outlet finds objectionable. Aided and abetted by Speech First, Turning Point USA, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom, conservative students have made it seem as if conservative speech is not only given short shrift, but is under constant attack.
Colleges and universities, of course, have long struggled to balance free speech and academic freedom with the rights of diverse students to feel safe from disparaging remarks and prejudice. It’s a proposition that has been made more difficult thanks to bills supported by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN), Koch-supported outfits that have tailored legislation in statehouses across the United States.
Among other restrictions, the proposed bills push fines on anyone who disrupts a speaker to challenge the veracity of a claim, no matter how racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, or anti-immigrant the sentiment. Between 2016 and 2020, ninety-nine “campus free speech bills” authored by ALEC and SPN were introduced in thirty-eight states, Wilson and Kamola report.
“In at least twenty-six of these states,” they write, “a total of 186 ALEC legislators sponsored sixty-three of the bills.” All told, they conclude, “we see the trusted strategy of using a network of think tanks and advocacy organizations to influence policy simply by flooding the discourse with networked—yet seemingly independent—voices.”
One model bill, the Forming Open and Robust University Minds Act (FORUM), prevents colleges and universities from denying recognition and funding to student groups that discriminate against LGBTQ+ students or that bar non-Christians from membership.
And even when these bills fail to pass, Wilson and Kamola note that they put administrators on notice that they should allow conservatives a platform to teach, create student organizations, and bring speakers to campus.
It’s been a winning strategy with many schools—including Arizona State, Georgetown, Middlebury, Sarah Lawrence, the University of Arizona, UCLA, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison—agreeing to Koch-inspired demands.
“They are creating a whole academic ecosystem in which donor-preferred ideas can thrive,” Wilson and Kamola conclude. “This ecosystem includes its own journals, conferences, professional organizations, and academic centers.”
That said, the authors do not want readers to close the book in despair; an Appendix offers resources for activists. In addition to a detailed reading list, Wilson and Kamola offer concrete, practical advice on “when and how to protest a speaker,” cautioning Koch opponents to define their goals, understand the risks, and prepare for retaliation. They also provide a brief look at alternatives to disruption—including filling seats and then turning away from the speaker—and hosting an event or teach-in at the same time as the offensive speaker’s appearance.
Compiling talking points in advance and exhaustively researching the issues at hand, the authors write, are also necessary. Lastly, they urge adults not to “apply pressure on young people to abide by ‘respectability politics.’ ”
It’s good advice, and while the book could have used more discussion of successful opposition to the Kochtopus, Free Speech and Koch Money is an insightful dive into the ways higher education has been impacted—indeed, manipulated—by conservatives. Read it and fight back.