Dive Brief:
- A panel tasked with reviewing philanthropic giving at George Mason University has recommended greater transparency and faculty involvement concerning gifts, identifying troubling language in 29 of 300 active agreements funding faculty positions that it says merits further discussion, according to The Washington Post.
- Several donor agreements were made between 2003 and 2011 supporting economics faculty appointments, with some involving donors in hiring. Those agreements have either expired or been voided.
- The review follows debate about a $10 million donation that political conservative and billionaire Charles Koch made through his foundation in 2016. It joined other gifts that led to the renaming of the university's law school after the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Dive Insight:
Another controversy concerning donor involvement in academic freedom is brewing at Missouri's Saint Louis University, where a $50 million gift was made to fund a new research institute and a center for applied economics. Faculty members say the donor made an inappropriate recommendation regarding who should be the director and continues to make decisions about research funding. The donation is the largest in the private, Catholic institution's history, and officials said it has the potential to attract new funding and projects that will raise the university's reputation in the region and across the country.
Similar questions have been raised about the role campus foundations at public colleges and universities. Campus foundations are separate nonprofit, tax-exempt, legal entities based at the institutions they are connected to, and are critical in bridging the gap left by dwindling state funding. The public institution can receive, spend and invest its foundation's funds as it chooses, often without the consent of campus governance officials who would normally have a say in how state funds are spent.
But a number of groups, especially faculty members, are calling into question the actions of some foundations' board members.
Leaders of campus foundations justify the practice of selecting board members affiliated with institutional vendors by saying board members give back to the college or university in several ways. But there often are conflicts of interest.
For instance, the American Association of University Professors cited findings that half the board members of the University of Georgia's foundation in the early 2000s had ties to companies doing business with the foundation or the university. Those same board members' companies received more than $30 million in business without disclosure of conflicts to the overall board.
Meanwhile, board members on the foundation associated with the College of DuPage, a community college in Illinois, received close to $200 million in business from mid-2010 to early 2015, often without a competitive bidding process, according to the Chicago Tribune.