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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

> When the Charles Koch Foundation pledges $1.5 million to Florida State University’s economics department, it stipulates that a Koch-appointed advisory committee will select professors and undertake annual evaluations.

Huh, that's surprisingly overt. Donations for things like endowed chairs or new buildings usually assumed to have an influence, as institutions don't like to offend potential sources of money. But it's rarely as direct as the donor actually getting to vet faculty hires. If the linked article [1] is correct, sounds pretty openly like an attempt by a private individual to literally buy control of part of a public institution.

[1] http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/billionaires-role-in-h...

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To be fair, the Gates Foundation basically singlehandedly bankrolled the political process to push through Common Core...so a private individual buying control of our public k-12 schools. There are differences here, but both are dangerous.

As much as a fan of Gates I am, not a sustainable/efficient system when power is fairly centralised and can be bought.

I really don't believe that anyone has "control" of our public schools-- unless their intent is to simply run them into the ground by failure.

Common Core passed so quickly because:

- States already had educational standards

- There was already tremendous interest in improving those standards

- English, science, and math work the same way in every state

- States already had a lot of experience with harmonizing standards, such as the Uniform Commercial Codes

Even today, with all the "controversy", the vast majority of states adhere to the Common Core, and even the states that don't, have essentially the same standards with a different name.

So, there's really no reason to call this the Gates Foundation "buying control" of public schools.

edit: clarity

If I were a student, alumnus, or professor of FSU, this would be quite annoying. However, from the outside, does this matter? Koch can't buy all the universities. I'm not aware that the FSU econ department is especially influential. It seems unlikely that Koch will be able to influence the direction of economic research or opinion through an action like this. Mostly he'll just be able to avoid the seeming embarrassment of the holder of the Chuck Koch Endowed Chair in Economics writing some paper that says, "Koch Industries sucks!"

>Koch can't buy all the universities.

They are billionaires. And this was only a $1.5 million dollar donation, so how many can they afford to buy this way? I'm thinking it's enough to have a real impact on higher education in the U.S.

I agree. I remember seeing some chart laying out the ROI of lobbying and how campaign contributions can be more or less directly connected to future government contracts worth 1000x of what they "contributed". Seems pretty logical to make the same "investment" in swaying public opinion on the legality/ethics of such a campaign finance system in the first place.

Here is the list of the Universities Koch was donated too: http://www.kochfamilyfoundations.org/pdfs/CKFUniversityProgr...

Koch is definitely having a impact on higher education, look at all the major universities he is involved in.

You don't need to buy out every university. You just need to buy out enough to "create a debate."

F-in dystopian, it's what this is.

It's very easy to turn to freedom as an argument and people making the choice, when education is finely tuned to shape said people.

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