The public is starting to catch up with the reality that Charles Koch is not only a major spender on building his own ideological institutions. Over the past decade, Koch has funded colleges and universities to bend them in his direction, often funding “free-market” academic centers. Mostly through his personal foundation, Koch gave $108 million [3] to 366 colleges and universities from 2005 to 2014 and still more since then: for example, $10 million [4] for George Mason University’s School of Law, which will be renamed after late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; $2 million [5] to Western Carolina University to establish a free-market center; and over $4.1 million approved for future payment to several schools according to the foundation’s 2014 990 tax form [6].
Some of these grants come with strings attached. At Florida State University, the initial memorandum of understanding [7] between the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) and the school’s economics department gave the foundation control over hiring decisions and the curriculum.
With his grants, Koch is installing libertarian-minded economics professors at hundreds of universities, so how do these professors coordinate their free-market agenda?