Dear President Cabrera,

You’ve admitted that George Mason University gave the Charles Koch Foundation and other partner donors influence over faculty hiring within its economics department. The now-public agreements also show that donors had a say over faculty removal if the professor did not promote their free-market agenda.

But you've only released some of the older agreements held by the university itself. You are still hiding others, including those held by the GMU Foundation, from public review.

The university’s admission of undue donor influence makes full transparency more necessary than ever. We demand that all gift agreements be made public and that the faculty, not the administration, lead an independent review of those gift agreements. That includes the release and review of agreements housed in the George Mason University Foundation.

For years, you reassured students and faculty that these violations of academic independence did not exist. You said, “Trust me.” We now know that these assurances were untrue. Indeed, these agreements represent a violation of the public trust, and suggest that George Mason University is “for sale” to the highest bidder.

Faculty, students, and the public have a right to know the full extent of donor influence at Mason. To rebuild trust, we call on you to release the agreements now!

MORE INFORMATION:

Faculty and students have been demanding transparency of gift agreements with Koch family Foundations since 2011. The university dismissed their requests time and time again by urging faculty and students to “trust them” or by suggesting that they are unable to release the agreements in question because the George Mason University Foundation, the university’s fundraising arm, is actually in possession of them.

Students involved in the student organization Transparent GMU eventually filed a lawsuit against the GMU Foundation for access to the donor agreements after it refused to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request. Their claim argues that the GMU Foundation performs a delegated function of George Mason University, a public entity, making the GMU Foundation a public body and legally responsible for responding to the Freedom of Information Act. The judge’s decision is still pending.

Since the revelation of these troubling agreements, the Faculty Senate has formally requested the university:

• amend the university Gift Acceptance Policy to ensure that all George Mason University Foundation gift, pledge, and grant agreements are published in a permanent online database for public review within 30 days of formal enactment.

• place two tenured faculty, to be elected by the Faculty Senate, on the Gift Acceptance Committee (GAC). Prior to gift acceptance, these two faculty must evaluate all major gift agreements for real or perceived conflicts of interest with regard to faculty governance and academic freedom and autonomy.

• undertake a comprehensive review of all existing gift agreements that support faculty positions, student scholarships, or academic programs or curriculum

George Mason University has received over $120 million from the Charles Koch Foundation since 2005. It hosts the Mercatus Center, which was “specifically credited with doing the academic work to support the $1.5 trillion tax cut passed in December” at Koch’s most recent donor summit, according to the Boston Globe. It also hosts the Institute for Humane Studies, which coordinates the “talent-pipeline” that Koch relies upon to staff their national infrastructure of think-tanks and advocacy organizations.

The Koch Foundation’s violations of academic independence were first exposed at Florida State University in 2011. There, the Charles Koch Foundation required the university to provide it with influence over hiring decisions, curriculum, and research. Koch’s “Undergraduate Program” at FSU involved the donor creation of several new courses, donor influence over at least nine courses, and donor control over introductory “principles” courses. Today, a Koch advisory board still has control over graduate fellowship selection and dissertation topics in Koch’s graduate and Ph.D fellowship program.