INCREASED FUNDING, INCREASED INFLUENCE

Koch university funding update 2005-2019

Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries, has overseen over $458 million in grants to over 550 universities and higher ed adjacent non-profits since 2005. Unlike other philanthropists backing higher education, Koch gives to schools with the explicit goal of creating intellectual fodder for his network of political interest groups, and recruiting and training students to integrate into that network.

Charles Koch himself admits that his funding of hundreds of universities across the country is intended to mainstream free-market ideas and approaches to public policy that support the Koch network's legislative goals at the state and federal levels:

“… there are basically four way in which [the pro-capitalist businessman] can fight for free enterprise – through education, through the media, by legal challenges, and by political action… I do maintain, however, that the educational route is both the most vital and the most neglected... We should [support] only those programs, departments or schools that contribute in some way to our individual companies or to the general welfare of our free enterprise system.” -- Charles Koch, 1974. 

Using recently released tax records, we discovered that in 2019, Koch university funding totaled $112,044,071. This is an increase of $23.9 million from 2018. It’s the second year in a row that Koch outspent its previous annual total by over $20 million. This one-year total is over a hundred million dollars more than Koch foundations spent annually on universities a decade ago, at $10.5 million in 2009.

George Mason University (GMU) in Virginia continues to eclipse all other schools that Koch funds. GMU, and the two Koch-controlled political organizations that are formally affiliated with GMU, the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), received a combined $23.4 million in 2019. GMU, Mercatus, and the IHS have received $179 million from Charles Koch’s foundations since 2005. This represents about 40% of Koch’s total $458.4 million in expenditures at over 500 college and university campuses and programs since 2005.

Unless we increase transparency and put policies in place to protect the classroom from outside ideological control, donor politics will take precedence over the education of tuition-paying students while the quality of higher education will continue to erode irreparably. In a nation-wide push for transparency, students and professors at Koch-funded schools continue to amass evidence demonstrating Charles Koch’s disregard for academic freedom in the classroom, an arena he considers to be up for sale to the highest bidder. We encourage all those at Koch-funded institutions of higher education to look into how this money is being used and at what cost to your job, education, reputation, and notion of academic freedom.  

Published May, 2021