Boston College has already taken money from the Charles Koch Foundation. $42,000 to be exact. So why are students and faculty divided about the possibility of taking more money? Who is Charles Koch and what are the recent developments? This is The Heights in Depth. To begin, we flash back to 1980. A billionaire by the name of Charles Koch founded a nonprofit organization with a goal of quote, funding research and education that helps people expand their horizons, develop their skills, and help others. For the last four decades, the Charles Koch Foundation has been providing grants to hundreds of universities and nonprofit organizations. But after breaches of academic integrity at George Mason University were exposed, watch dogs and funding recipients have been growing increasingly wary of the attention of the Koch Foundation. Charles Koch grew his fortune out of Koch industries, the second largest private company in the U.S. His father was an oil tycoon and Charles was in business with his late brother David who served as executive vice president. Charles has served as CEO since 1967, overseeing companies such as Stainmaster, Dixie, and Quilted Northern. He is the 11th richest person in the world with evaluation of roughly 50.5 billion according Forbes. Outside of his overwhelming wealth and corporate success, Charles Koch has become known for his conservative views, his support of small government and the maximization of personal freedoms. He is also notorious for his opposition to climate change science and legislation. And so these policies that are being introduced in the United States as a matter of fact, under their own models will have virtually zero impact on the future temperature or the other aspects of the climate. To this end, the Koch Foundation has given hundreds of millions of dollars to fund research and nonprofit work that are aligned with Koch's political views, resulting in substantial pushback. The Koch Foundation has found itself in hot water over its funding of specific programs at universities, where it is infringed on academic freedom and hiring procedures. One instance occurred after a lawsuit from George Mason University students, where unsealed documents revealed that Charles and David were placed on committees that dealt with faculty hiring as a result of donations made to the university. This began as early as 1990, but 10 years later, George Mason received $900,000, as long as they hired an economics professor whom the Koch's liked, according to a copy of the agreement signed by George Mason University. In 2009, the Koch brothers were still on committees at George Mason which selected economics faculty for the Mercatus Center, a think tank created with money from the Koch Foundation. Faculty who had views aligned with the Koch brothers were selected for the openings according to the New York Times. And similar practices have emerged at the likes of Florida State University and Arizona State University, where Charles Koch gained access to academic administrative circles through his foundation's donations. In response, uncoke my campus was formed to investigate and monitor the donations by the Koch Foundation to hire education. The height spoke with Samantha Parsons, a co-founder who was a student at George Mason to learn more. I took my campus actually started as an investigative effort by these college students to learn more about how many colleges, Charles Koch Foundation, was invested in and why. And once we learned those answers and realized that universities were very much key to the Koch Network's political agenda and the adoption of policies that have supported the Koch Network's agenda, we started the campaign walk broadly and started bringing in other students. Due to the backlash over academic infringement, the Foundation has said that every grant funds a faculty members vision and it does not alter the hiring or academic protocol to the university. Since 2018, a list of the Foundation's grant agreements with universities has been publicly available on their website after they came under fire for some of their donation agreements. These multi-year agreements are different from one-time donations that the Foundation often makes universities for, quote, general operating support, unquote. The Koch Foundation declined to be interviewed for this story, but they provided a statement to the heights that reads, quote, that Charles Koch Foundation is committed to the highest standards of open inquiry and academic freedom and make possible the open exchange of ideas that enables both individual and societal progress. One multi-year agreement that is public on their website is with the University of Notre Dame, a school that Robert Ross, a political science faculty member and proponent of the proposal at Boston College, has pointed to as evidence that academic integrity is not at stake with BC's proposal. Notre Dame signed an agreement with the Koch Foundation in 2019 that granted the school $1.5 million for the Constitutional Studies Program. The director of the program was named in the contract, however the agreement states that the normal hiring procedures of the university will stay in place. The 2019 deal comes after a $5 million grant in 2015, but the details of this contract are not public. Boston College has received $42,000 from the Koch Foundation in the form of general operating support through annual donations made between 2015 and 2018. The funding was for graduate research support. Boston College ranks at number 34 and money received from the Koch Foundation when compared to the other 39 schools ranked in the top 40 by US News. Other universities have received far more funding, with Rice University and Houston receiving the most of any school in the top 40 at $5.36 million. In addition to the small annual funding that Boston College receives, the university is currently in the midst of deciding whether or not to accept money for the foundation for a five-year agreement of its own, which would fund a security studies program titled New Perspectives on US Grant Strategy and Great Power Politics. The Office of University Advancement is actively in negotiations with the Koch Foundation over funding for the program, which would be housed in the Political Science Department. The Political Science Faculty held two votes during the spring and fall semesters of 2019 to determine whether or not to move ahead with the proposal. The vote in the fall semester approved the vision statement, which would include a lecture series, fellowships for graduate students, and a five-year joint hire in the Political Science Department and International Studies program. The vote passed with a strong majority, according to Ross. In early December, the International Studies program rejected their proposal and asked to be removed from the vision statement. Their proposal was still alive, but the vision statement was amended to remove the joint hire. In December, a petition with over 1,000 signatures in opposition to the Koch Foundation's proposal was submitted to administrators. The petition cited Charles Koch's history of climate change denial and the risk of infringement on academic integrity as the reasons that the proposal should be rejected. Recently, the proposal was converted into a project. This conversion is significant because a project, unlike a proposal, is not voted on by the faculty and it will not receive the endorsement of the Political Science Department. The project, however, will still be housed within the department. Because the Koch funding will now be received in the form of a project, there will also be no advisory board to oversee the use of funds. The timeline and approval process for the project to be implemented is not immediately clear.