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Koch donation should trouble students FSView Editorial
J. MICHAEL OSBORNE Editor-in-Chief About as soon as the St. Petersburg Times’ article on Charles G. Koch’s suspicious $1.5 million donation to Florida State University’s economics department went online this past Tuesday, May 10, FSU students were getting outraged on their social networks of choice. This was more of a crest in a wave of recent dissatisfaction with Florida
Letter to the Editor My name is Alex Saunders. I am a student at Florida State University and have been following the Koch Foundation story on campus very closely. First off, I have acquaintances that are alumni from Florida State that threaten to no longer donate to the FSU Foundation if the foundation continues to allow Koch or other private interest groups to influence the advisory panel so closely.
education, and the way FSU handles money in general, than an isolated incident—cuts to Bright Futures, tuition hikes, program cutbacks and the election of Gov. Rick Scott come to mind—yet the response to this particular issue of politically based faculty appointments has had a distinct air of urgency around it. And rightly so: If the Times piece is right, and our school would lie down for Koch’s 2008 donation and advisory position with “several strings attached,” then what do we stand for? It’s a bittersweet moment to see one’s student body get so upset over something so potentially damning—it’s a reminder
that our university will still be held accountable to its primary import, export and financiers, whether they like it or not. But, when our immediate response to this unconfirmed story is to call our school a whore or, as one commenter on our website indicated, reconsider attending FSU’s Department of Economics entirely, I think a more reasonable approach is needed. FSU President Eric Barron, as well as Dean of the College of Social Sciences David Rasmussen, have done nothing since Tuesday but stress that FSU maintains control in faculty choices. “First and foremost, Florida State University
absolutely did not—and would not—sacrifice academic freedom in order to receive a donation of any kind,” Barron wrote in an email. “The Times story stated that the Koch Foundation exerted undue influence over the hiring of new professors in our economic department [...] This is simply not the case.” Of course, if the Times story has more truth to it than Barron or Rasmussen admits, both would probably be saying the same thing they are now. So I’m not saying to simply trust our university leaders blindly, or even to wait until we know more to pass any judgment on the matter. My point is that we should be doing
everything we can to let our leaders know that, if Koch or any other donor is making the decisions for our university, we will not stand for it. Students holding signs outside Wescott—keep holding signs. Facebook activists—keep incessantly posting links to more articles on this subject. This shouldn’t be something we do when we get really upset about something—this should be our modus operandi. We should be pressing our university for information and open discourse; we should be asking why it took two letters in the Tallahassee Democrat and a sensationalistic Times article, three years after the fact, to even be
aware that our university is involved with Koch’s politically outspoken Charitable Foundation. This shouldn’t be a call to arms or a call to disavow FSU as being a $1.5 million prostitute, but rather a wake-up call: We should be constantly seeking out information on FSU’s decisions and—more pertinently— its money trail. We at the FSView & Florida Flambeau, as well as the Democrat and Times, will keep doing our job to make that information more accessible, but if we as students are going to be giving four years and all our money to this school, we have to take it upon ourselves to hold FSU accountable.
They see it as an ethics violation and a conflict of interest. Students are expected to learn in an open atmosphere where all sides are considered and NOT to take courses that preach hyper-partisanship. The alumni are for one grateful that Florida State President Eric Barron does not wish to see Koch influence the hiring of the professors, but the alumni are also dismayed that the Department of Economics receiving the money has most of the control in the hiring decision. Further, even though the hiring committee has two Florida
State Economic Department representatives to one Koch representative, the two FSU reps must still be approved by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation. Second, as a student, I am discouraged to see the lack of information presented to the students. The faculty has been emailed by President Barron, and there will be a meeting next week among the faculty, but students are still very left in the dark. We are conflicted by differing stories from our university, our professors, and the media (St. Pete Times
and Tallahassee Democrat). I have been wanting to write an Op-Ed to both of those papers, as well as others, but have many sources preventing me from writing an accurate piece. My actions this past week have been hours and days of protesting outside of the president’s office to let students know that this issue is happening on our campus. I understand that Koch Industries has been ruthless in their attempt to dismantle this country and place it into two factions. They are the largest supporters of climate
change denial, and all business decisions made by Koch are derived from their private interest in dirty energy. I cannot comprehend how it is in any way healthy to accept a donation for such courses at Florida State, especially if Koch has influence on all three advisers on the hiring committee for the professors. I am a student at a public university, and I stand by my conviction that our education cannot be bought by a private interest group. Lastly, I have been called naïve for wanting Florida State to deny a
private donation. I know my Bright Futures is being stripped, I know the pay at my job is not going up and I know that funding from the university is in a free-fall. I feel the pain as much as anyone. I stand against Koch because they fund the very politicians that are adamantly denying deserving middle—and lower— income students from having a great education. And I stand against Koch at Florida State because it is not their $1.5 million we are accepting; it is the spreading of their agenda to dismantle this country. —Alex Saunders
Seemingly honest lies can divide the country
Hope Will Never Be Silent
Look at It This Way Daniel Ackerman
CAMERON GAUTHIER Staff Writer In Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, he said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Conservatives have known this to be true for quite some time and continue (sometimes successfully) using it to their advantage. That is, they continuously attempt to create often-irrelevant social fears to further their own economic agenda. I will admit that voters deserve part of the blame for blindly following the politicians who claim to share the same moral and political views, but it makes this creation of fear no less shameful. Recently the debate over Obama’s nationality has reached sickening levels of publicity and, though I am stooping a bit to even bring it up, I feel that the situation merits significant criticism. First off, do people truly believe that a man who attended Colombia University, Harvard Law School, was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and served in multiple political positions before becoming president did so by using a fake birth certificate and not having legitimate citizenship?
Do people truly believe that, when he became a candidate for president of the United States, there wasn’t an extensive check on his eligibility? Disturbingly, they do. Anyone who knows how to use the Internet could have easily discovered that his birth certificate was posted back in 2008. When, caving to the pressure from right-wing extremists, the president released his full birth certificate, I was a bit disappointed. I know that Obama could have released a video of himself being born on the beaches of Hawaii Island while Kilauea erupted in the background over a
row of Hawaii state flags and U.S. flags while doctors took on-scene DNA tests to confirm his identity, and the “birthers” would still question the legitimacy of his birth certificate. Rumors like this start with the pundits who spew their opinions as if they are facts, and the listeners and viewers unquestioningly interpret them as such. The issue is that, despite some very differing views on politics and pretty much everything, these pundits are not stupid. They know exactly what they need to say to create doubt and fear. They know exactly how to take advantage
of listeners and viewers who (unfortunately) trust them for true and accurate news. Former Sen. Daniel Moynihan is attributed with saying, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Nothing could be truer. People become so convinced that what they believe to be true actually is true, that they treat it as a proven, undeniable fact. When it comes to lawmaking, this issue becomes even more problematic when the issue at hand cannot be confirmed or denied by fact at all. This generally applies to social issues—such as same-sex marriage.
Worse still is when people use opinions to negate solid facts. A wonderful example of this is when conservatives decided that, because there was a blizzard during winter, climate change is nonexistent. Using similar logic, I could conclude that, because I ate four pints of ice cream and didn’t get fat, ice cream must not be fattening (despite what the label says). Fear can be beneficial. It is an acknowledgment of threats and can trigger responses that lead to solutions. However, when fear is based on falsifications, prejudgments and misrepresented opinions, there is no solution to be
reached. The politicians and pundits who spread lies to overly trusting constituents in order to create fear are weakening the foundations of our country—turning the people on each other over issues that aren’t even issues at all. The conspiracy theories, scare tactics and accepted bigotry are social tactics used to demonize those who may prevent increased income to conservatives and their supporters. I will close with a quote by Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”