well once again to the radical imagination i'm your host that i'm a sociologist at john jay college here in new york donald trump and his administration isn't the only con game in town he would have been elected had there not been widespread financial support by his fellow plutocrats who are also rooted in their obsession for money more money and greed for more control and power yet their social political economic and moral damage to the country and world couldn't be carried out without the conscious and in many cases rationalized complicity of many others who have acquiesced to their game in the more colorful parlance of the s they've copped out sold out or have been bought off perhaps nowhere has this happened in a more destructive way than in our universities and colleges the suppose it bedrock of our creative intellectual life the institutions where we form our ability to be reflective moral and critical thinkers in an enormously influential nine hundred and sixty nine book american power in the new mandarins noam chomsky describes how many of our academic scholars and public intellectuals of that era used their privileged positions to falsify restrict and subvert the possibility of true progressive change in the country chomsky has described these lack careerists and reactionary members in circles of power as having their counterparts in a new generation of american mandarins in the academy the morally bankrupt ass kissers of our day much of the inspiration for this show today comes from the widely acclaimed recent book dark money by new yorker writer jane mayer she refers to the term as the basis for the hidden history of the koch brothers and a small number of allied billionaire plutocrats who invested in the campaigns of others and essentially bought their way to political power hijacking american democracy and giving rise to the radical right on campus the koch foundation has grants in over two hundred and ten colleges and universities that allows the koch brothers to have excessive control over recruitment syllabus design publishing and research with the aim of exposing students exclusively to their far right ideology and point of view the money was meant to be kept in a dark secret place hidden from public view and transparency under radical magination show today we have three courageous whistleblowers and truth tellers who are as reverend william barber founder of the forward together moral movement would put it standing in the breach as true repairers o breach they are among the ones who are speaking out against this dark secret cesspool of intellectual and moral cowardice has become part of our contemporary academic world deed to bliss city often starts at the top of the academic administrative food chain will be exploring the case of john jay college of criminal justice part of the city university system of new york and the influence of the koch brothers dark in dirty blood money on campus it could only happen with the denial obfuscation and outright support by the administration and others on campus john jay's motto as the premier criminal justice school of the country is that it sees and calls itself a fierce advocate of justice a more accurate bato might be that's become a fierce advocate for its own power and expansion and increasingly an advocate and cover for the greed racist and regressive criminal justice policies and thinking of the radical right on campus often in the face of enormous pressures by the administration and other faculty members calling for her to back down fortunately for all of us she refused to do that matthew johnson is a professor of psychology at the college and is now a major organizer and spokesperson on campus to unco the college and our rd guest is ralph wilson who is the co founder and senior research activist of the unco my campus movement the major organization in the country that is raising our consciousness about dark money on campus we're so grateful to have them on the show today welcome delores matt and ralph to the radical imagination thank you joe thank you all thank you all and what we're going to do is start with the laura who is calling in can't believe it's been that long john jay college held a conference call the misdemeanor justice project is a two day conference where we were looking at criminal justice reform and it appeared to have a really sort of  we were examining the way that fines and fees were making people work for and looking at other criminal justice issues including police reform at the conclusion of the nd day i am still convinced that he has denied it but i heard president jeremy travis say that he wanted to test thank our funding partners the koch brothers for their support of the two day event now my st experience with the koch brothers was a rumor that i had heard that they were supporting george george zimmerman's defense in his trial for the killing of trayvon martin and they had been called a call for national boycott which i participated in so when i heard that somehow john jay was affiliated with had a partnership with a code brothers and someone said yes he said the previous day when i was not at the conference i then sent out an email expressing my concern to several members on campus that we could not call ourselves fierce advocates for justice if we had an alliance with the koch brothers and in fact i was sent a list from the internet from year two thousand and thirteen the list it turned to college is one of among like you said about two hundred and thirteen colleges that had received some funds from the koch brothers and initially they were still in denial that there was any connection between john kerry and the koch brothers ultimately there was a meeting in which president travis said to me we would have to agree to disagree whether or not it was we'll talk more about this as i was preparing to leave the college because they did not want to be involved with the college they would be accepting funds from the koch brothers we began to see advertisements on the college web site for various kinds thank the lawrence for putting this on the agenda absolutely i learned about this issue with the coax at the college to dolores right in the in as we all did the initial message she sent to the president right after she laura said he initially denied there was any any connection and you know i don't know how to evaluate that whether it was whether it was it wasn't technically at that moment but later it emerged or whether it was maybe disingenuous that it wasn't a formal relationship but it was already he was in a process of all of the something being put together i certainly don't know but you're very generous but what i was concerned about was that the president said that he would defend such a relationship and that it could be defended based upon his perception his notion of academic freedom and when he said that i had i was troubled by that because it seemed as though he was using academic freedom which is an important principle and to justify like anything you know and academic freedom is a it is a principle it's a notion it's not an absolute principle i mean people at the academy aren't  of speech academic freedom the right to bear arms these are our notions and slogans that on around but they're not absolute they don't protect people from from from their responsibility for wrong doing so i became very misdemeanor project apparently the cops were not attached to that to that project that was they got funding from some other source but then later on i recognize it for the st time in the spring of two  what the extent of it is and you know something that is is an important principle is transparency where public university if there's some sort of relationship and it's the faculty should be made aware of it as well as the student body and it should be something that's considered in the contents of the overall government of governance of the school but frankly i didn't act on it right away i was that there was in the spring of two hundred and sixteen later on into the fall of two  i corresponded with steve hamilton who is the director of the john jay center for media crime in justice and it was actually on the center's website that i saw the ad and i asked him about the   present about it which i subsequently shared with many people and laid out you know that there was a prior discussion between you and professor jones brown about the koch's you denied it was a connection and and you said that it would be ok however under academic freedom and i laid out to him specifically why i thought the nose of academic freedom he was without a problem in this case was not not only in this case it's not appropriate beyond this case that academic freedom doesn't mean that faculty member at a university and it's an academy of i want to conduct research that involves people my research has to be reviewed by peers to ensure that my research doesn't present potential harms to people that might be engaged in the research when these of these are principles that stem from recognition of of major you know human rights violations that have been attached to so called scientists a great scientific research really needs to be brought out most but when questioned about the statement he denied having made it which to me is an indication that he understood that there was something problematic about having that connection and had to make the announcement deny having made it and then suggest that somehow i was in the wrong for having suffered the point again was education to me that he understand even though it may have been an after the fact understanding that there was something inappropriate or challenging about that connection and i also want to clarify that even at the time when the statement was made and i put the real out folks  receipt you know recipient of support and so now now sometimes these lists they put out don't perfectly coincide with their ninety tax forms which either means that koch you know maybe co founded an event but did not give money directly to the college so that might be sort of a lack of those kinds of records i figured i'd throw it in there because it's so the most recent data point for that gap so you know you know this is this is what i do all day this is what i think about all day and i think that you know i'm really glad that you all you know are sort of honing in on the the critical question namely what is academic freedom and how is what we're seeing different in fact a departure from academic freedom and so i mean you know right on the head you know this economic freedom is not a blank check that means that you can do whatever you want and call it academics and where our organization comes into play you know i got started at florida basis of our concern as we're looking at these contracts and we're seeing literally you know the provisions that allow the koch foundation to pull their money with you as little as fifteen days notice from you know any of the program know tremendous amount of curricular items as well as extracurricular things that created a student group so this is also these are things are stipulated in the contract and you know there's also basically this this clause that is ideological in nature  for one second because i think i'd be very helpful for our audience to understand what is their agenda what make as friends in the policy what tempting to do right so so that is exactly the big question that we've stumbled into was sort of looking at these contracts you know we see these provisions we see them essentially the koch foundation is leveraging universities for political change and through the course of of looking more into this we actually were able to recover their explicit model for privately funded policy change and this model they refer to as the structure of social change it's it's based on a model of production because of course they're engineers  so their model goes a little something like this you know coke convenes a big network of their of the of the wealthiest people in the country they now go by the name of the freedom partners chamber of commerce cook pulls all of these wealthy donors together twice a year summits and famously this is where they fund their political campaigns and they pick the candidates that they're going to back but what in fact that they're doing is part of this what they call integrated strategy so  donors in fact the the higher education work is the foundation for all of their long term political strategy so these donors will fund a university to produce what they call intellectual raw materials you know papers or you know  more usable it's a policy talking points or a policy reporter something that can hand off to a lobbyist or something like that but then you know this is not quite enough network then funds you know a big army of political front groups groups that are supposed to look like grassroots organizations but are facts you know top down created by corporations on the corporate money so astroturf or fake grassroots groups these three pieces funding universities funding think tanks and funding political activities is what the koch network refers to as their integrated strategy and the end result of that is and i'm quoting directly here the implementation of policy change and so we see that basically in the larger scale the koch's and their network of donors are leveraging universities in a very specific way to maximise their political donations but in order to do this in order to leverage university that means they're controlling the outputs that means that they're necessarily violating academic freedom and the faculty governance that is supposed to leave faculty in charge of creation of curriculum overseeing of you know hiring these sorts of things and so violation of academic freedom is a necessary part for is well known that they are one of the largest contributors to air and water pollution in the country this is undisputed their own bill and they want to yes they want to they don't want the government to regulate them them they want to be able to pollute the environment and not have to pay to clean up course and so toward that end they want a smaller government because they want corporations to be so large the government cannot regulate corporations and this will be allow them us that's another one of economy for their money but they say freedom but they really mean their freedom from regulation so that they can act to the detriment of people that don't have the same financial means they have so for example if i said well let's say i'm thirty years old strong vigorous young man and i want to be able to attack somebody who walks down the street who's elderly and can't defend themselves and if the government stops me from doing that the government is what they're limiting my freedom that is   support candidates in counties primarily in the south with in other places and then they get these these candidates to sell the local jail and can we just as apparatus to private corporations who then can make money from running these corporations and then the and then through their political activities they support judges who will get elected who ensure that the prison stay full so that the private companies entities can continue to be more profitable you know moving from now or from privatized i learned about much of this move to route frankly that they're moving from privatizing prisons to now privatizing the reentry impro process so they want to my children and i think it's to me it's illustrated you know now people think it's ok to go to the store and buy a bottle of water but we're old enough to remember when that started when he  outside is the having a in people's tenure and promotion having stay in the curriculum with the red if the school doesn't do what it said then they will withdraw the money and that is antithetical to academic freedom if you can possibly get greater so so ralph you have been active in leading this movement to raise our consciousness about all of this because this is something as the book implies dark money is hidden that secret how do you go about your research and how are you beginning to organize campuses i know you were just at john jay and you're traveling all around  how's it going how are you doing all of this well several questions it's going great i'm having a blast everyone is obviously horrified when they learn these details and so you know to find local ways to plug into you know meaningful resistance to corporate power and so the work is is going well in that sense what you know what we're able to do really depends on the university depends on the state for and for example we actually just put out a book in january entirely based on koch's presence and activities at florida state university this is sort of where we have have known about the issue for the longest on and because of florida's open records laws we have been able to submit records requests and recover tremendous amounts of thousands of documents pertaining to folks activities through these documents were able to reconstruct the constraints that come along with coax programming some of the details of what has been a result of it what donors are allowed to create and what they're just supporting with their money and you know this this deep dive at florida state because of our access to these public records has allowed us to produce a two hundred dollars plus page book that is basically the most in depth look at any campus with the relationship to cope and so we use these details or any similar details that we find at the campus as we continue and basically have a snowballing body of work that we can share with faculty so for example recently at wake forest the verse in north carolina there was there was a freshly announced coke center and the faculty as very often is the case didn't know about it until it appeared to have been a done deal already and so these things are very secretive from the start that makes it a challenge we see in many of the contracts just to give you a sense there's over four hundred schools that have received money from the trolls foundation we have our hands on maybe a dozen contracts and so every everything that we know we are having to basically pieced together from the very few documents we have given that these documents are incredibly similar and so with the wake forest faculty a way force as a private university they were not allowed to do records request and the administration refused to give them any of the documents even as the faculty senate had requested them for the purposes of an investigation and so instead what we were able to do is you know we provide you know all of the materials that we have to anyone who is interested in digging in and what the faculty at wake forest did with said well ok if you can if you will not produce these documents we have to assume the worst case scenario we have to assume what we see in other in other similar contracts and so they did just that and you know essentially we find what we can find as far as primary sources documents the research that we do on a campus to campus basis also includes what are the who who are the other donors present alongside koch what are their business interests who are the professors who are receiving this funding what is their research background you know do they work for other coke funded political entities one thing that we're consistently finding is that the faculty who are receiving this money have a long career working alongside coke's political activities and so we're able to sort of  infer directly and indirectly many of the many of the items of concern whether a donor was allowed to create a whole major or a new program or you know a cup of course how does that all play itself out in terms of investigating administration presidents do you find what dolores and matter been talked about in terms of resistance and you know as they describe a present travesty find that rather typical and how do you analyze it's consistent there's a consistent pattern not only of administrative resistance i mean again if if the money is already there these administrators are very often contractually bound again there's a subpar to these contracts that say that they are not allowed to disclose the contents or even existence of the agreement to a rd party and so if an administr signed one of these they might feel especially bound to it but at the same time another pattern that we are seeing is programs showing up at schools where a president has been recently removed or resigned and another president who is sort of friendlier with the political agenda of the donor has been installed this is a this is a especially the case at public universities where very often the board d of trustees the trustees themselves are political appointees and so in states where you have governors who are put into place with you know boatloads of coke money and money from their donor partners basically they're allowed to use the political appointees of the  herald a lot of this programming through for instance at florida state the chair of our board of trustees was the chair of the biggest koch funded think tank in the state the james madison institute while a lot of this was going on the president that we had at the time  had ties to lobbyists in the state and so we see patterns of what we call administrative capture all the way through the from the upper administration all the way down to the level of deans and chairs  basically allowing this to go through and breaking up any faculty dissent that comes along the way one other pattern that i'll just mention because this is very relevant is and i mentioned that a lot of times faculty or the campus doesn't find out about a new center or some programming until it's already done it's a done deal well in many of these cases the faculty have have pushed back into the faculty senate have taken votes to stop the acceptance or reject the acceptance of the money or even in george mason recently voted george mitchell law school the fact lee senate voted to just hold off on the on the agreement to just review the to review the contract because there were so many obvious flaws with it in all these cases and consistently we're seeing the administration are just bulldozing faculty dissent left and right and even in instances where the faculty are almost unanimous in their dissent these programs are being created anyway and so you know i think i think there's a there's a very there's a very real power within the faculty oftentimes the their input is taken merely as an advisory opinion and the administration will thank you for all the hard work that you put into that but you know for us i guess one thing i'll mention this very important is we're not we're not going out trying to necessarily stop coke money from getting on campus that's a really hard ask in a time of great austerity for many of these universities what we are what we are demanding and what we are trying to help faculty ensure is that no donor no matter their ideology is allowed to have strings attached to their money and this has to do with getting faculty active in reviewing and calling for transparency but also changing policy at the university level which is something that we're we're finding there's not a uniform policy about is what donors are and are not allowed to get in return for money and so this is something where the faculty can assert their their governance and protect their their own their academic freedom right right the lord i know you've got an appointment so i want to bring you back in here for any comments or questions you might have at this point in terms financial support we actually were kind of promised when it was just an idea and clearly i think the president may well enough that if he had come to me with the idea that this organization would be  underhanded ways in which the codes are operated i am concerned and that in fact president travis has resigned from his position as president the college effect on august st and  to get a more complete story and this is the type of thing that young people i mean many of the not aware of the not aware of you know but i had i had another experience i want to share about this whole question of academic freedom and transparency i did my doctoral dissertation back in the one thousand nine hundred and eighty s and i did my doctoral dissertation on cycle social distress and cardiovascular disease what social psychological behavioral things led to cardiovascular disease and in my doctoral dissertation i cited a canadian medical researcher who was a leader in the field and he had developed this notion of stress adaptation and how inappropriate adaptation lead to cardiovascular disease although i think depending on the university there's there's certainly standing me the trouble with academic freedom is that it's not a law per se best case scenario i think you know it shows up in a collective bargaining agreement which is i think where  he would have considerable standing you know if they were able to show that there was a violation you know that it would be a contractual violation currently there is there is not such a legal action that has been taken  you know there have been some some lawsuits filed based on administration refusing to produce public records but not yet from faculty asserting their their rights and govern instead of kind of taking it as a loss and planting your feet and maybe looking for injunctive relief they did something that was that i think in the long term might be well it was it was it was very smart they  they said ok well if you're going to force the center to be here then we are going to oversee it and they basically what about creating an independent oversight body that instead of just letting it linger on campus they now know what to look for and are actively looking for it and partway through that they'll be able to basically produce a producer report on whether or not this you know this program did what everyone was concerned that it would do or maybe it turned out for the best you know i'm not holding my breath because i have a feeling that we know how it's going to turn out but you know that was one way that they kind of were nimble enough to not take the full loss i think they while the while the program is still a problem they set a new precedent for active faculty governance and honestly i think that is in the right direction in a big way i think i think there are grounds for injunctive relief when when faculty bulldozing it the university of kentucky administration bulldozed two separate faculty votes consecutive votes against the creation of a new center so i think that's i think that's not i think that's that's an interesting direction  and not to get to part from the question but one thing i'd love to point out you know matt you know you bring up to back zero dollars you bring up this example of you know prison funded prison research and you know these these things  both of these things were very very tightly orchestrated with what lots of different organizations including the american legislative exchange council and for those who don't know what alec is the american legend legislative exchange council allows corporate lobbyists effectively to draft laws themselves and then hand them off to legislators that take them home and file them in in their own states mention in in the report that i've shared around through the center for media democracy it's a lock step with alex current criminal justice or agenda but one thing to note i guess and this is a important story the fact that you know the current crisis in criminal justice you know obviously has longstanding roots to to this the the history of slavery in this country to the history of white supremacy in this country but in its modern incarnation the and many of these things which the cooks and their folks you know claim to be against but in fact these were all creations of alec which was primarily supported by coke and these other corporate funders so these people are responsible for the current prison duster complex and now they want to guide the narrative again and i actually you know the the work that they're doing just really uses a bunch of the same talking points of tough on crime in fact it's all right on it's called right on crime they don't even bother to change the name that isn't one word and they're on the drug war so called drug war what is that awful similar in terms of toughness getting tough or how do they couch it in terms of rehabilitation well you know what there are a lot of the claims that are being made is that it's ok so doris alluded to this earlier they want to be seen as being opponents of mass incarceration yet they don't say mass incarceration the word that they use is over criminalize ation and people think oh that's close enough  then as delores pointed out when you get into the details of what they mean when they same that over criminalization they're talking about making it harder to prove criminal intent in white collar crime situations so when you actually are finding out you know where they're what are their views on these issues they actually don't really address a lot of these things you know and so in some of the some of the people say oh the most important thing that we can do to fix you know the criminal justice system is reduce recidivism which is the kind of quote unquote reform ignores the front end of the problem and says oh maybe if we can just scrub the back and you know it's like scrubbing coal emissions you're keeping the problem intact and then you're pretending to add a fix on just at the end and so a lot of these things you know while the koch sort of would would have people consider them a free market libertarians you know it's it's their opportunistic corporatists that basically claim libertarians claim to be libertarians when it when it suits them so that it does not seem to be a sort of inherently justice driven interest in criminal justice reform and in fact they only got into it after they saw saw a way for it to serve their bottom line and now obviously all of their sort of old friends from alec  private prisons have jumped on board because you know now they've got a big wave of what appears to be bipartisan reform and bipartisan support but it's just a trick it's just the same trick from the ninety's and there's no discussion on the enormous economic inequality of