UnKoch My Campus Responds to Virginia Supreme Court Ruling Against Transparent GMU
Today’s ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court to uphold the ongoing obfuscation of terms and conditions attached to financial agreements between private donors and public universities fails Virginia’s students and taxpayers.
Transparent GMU, a student advocacy organization at George Mason University, first filed a lawsuit against their school in April of 2018 to better understand how private donors were influencing who was hired, what was taught, and what research was published by their public university.
Despite George Mason being a public university, donor agreements with the Charles Koch Foundation and other private funders have been kept secret from students, faculty, and Virginia taxpayers for years. The university uses a private fundraising foundation, the GMU Foundation, to accept all of its private donations-- it then claims the GMU Foundation is not subject to the state’s open records laws. The student’s case argued that the fundraising foundation is performing a core function of the public university, making its activities subject to Virginia open records laws just like any other public institution in the state.
This lawsuit, supported by attorney Evan Johns at Appalachian Mountain Advocates, has been a driving force behind a growing national movement to stop wealthy donors from exploiting philanthropic giving to exert outsized influence over vital public institutions. UnKoch My Campus currently supports over 30 campuses in 14 states that have active campaigns against donor influence. UnKoch My Campus started as a response to the Koch network’s efforts to influence thousands of elections and public policy decisions that seek to roll-back decades of social protections and economic progress for people of color, workers, and the environment. The Charles Koch Foundation has created university programs and research centers on over 350 campuses nationwide to build ideological support for these policies that favor corporate wealth over the needs of the common good.
Not only is the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling a barrier to transparency and accountability, but it serves to maintain strategies of the wealthy elite to further corrupt fundamental tenets of democracy. Thankfully our organizers are resilient and have other strategies they are dedicated to pursuing to ensure our democracy is protected.
The organizing by students and faculty at George Mason University did result in the proposal of legislation that would create rules for disclosing conditions of university donations. The legislation is currently being studied by the state’s Freedom of Information Act Committee. Last month, Transparent GMU also launched a new campaign calling on George Mason University to officially remove Koch-funded research centers, including the Mercatus Center, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Law and Economics Center, from its campus.
Student organizing already proved that Koch-funded think-tanks at George Mason University came with terms and conditions that provided donors with inappropriate control over the university itself. Removing these think-tank’s ability to brand itself alongside an academic institution can effectively remove the public impact of the initial tainted donation. Where the Virginia Supreme Court fails in protecting our communities, our students will step up.