We have heard constant patter about who opposes Common Core. According to Arne Duncan, only the Tea Party and a few disgruntled cranks oppose it.
But more interesting is who supports Common Core. Aside from Arne Duncan and the organizations that created it, Common Core has the fervent support of Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, a dozen hard-right Republican governors, and corporate America.
Erin Osborne has created a useful graphic to show who supports Common Core. Read it here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is getting more and more difficult to locate supporters of education and education experts whose hands are not stained with Gates & Co. monies. Could someone come up with a graphic, small it may be, of organizations dedicated to Real Education, performed by Real Teachers without $M Corporated connections whose sole purpose is to Profit off our children?
I just received the latest copy of a journal I used to enjoy. Now I have trouble opening the front cover even though they occasionally have interesting articles. The latest topic is on Writing: A Core Skill. Just the title is enough to upset my stomach. Along with the journal a PD planning guide arrived with a selection of their publications. Now, because CCSS has taken the joy out of learning they are offering publications that will help us add joyful learning techniques to the drudgery of test prep. Excuse me while I vomit! Of course there are volumes of material to align us with CCSS; the catalog reads like a marketing campaign. Why we can even learn the 55 most critical vocabulary words that students absolutely need to know for success in the Common Core world. Do you need to maximize your student learning time? None of that messy downtime where your students aren’t waving their fingers or talking at their neighbors. To be fair, there are resources that I might actually want to read if the publication didn’t reek of reform rapture. Right now, I am gritting my teeth. Does that mean I have grit?
When moderates like Chris Christie get lumped in with the “hard right,” the term has no meaning. Furthermore, it seems a bit odd to not also mention the support from President Obama and every Democratic governor in the country. Common Core is truly bipartisan stupidity.
Considering that “moderates” today of the dimocrap persuasion are far to the right of Tricky Dick Nixon, well. . . .
Depends what issue you are talking about. Many in the GOP today are to the left of the leftiest 1960s professor when it comes to social issues.
To borrow a comment, “The last liberal U.S. President, was Dwight Eisenhower.”
But what Democrat, in today’s climate, would support the price freeze that Nixon imposed? Or detente in foreign policy?
I think that if Barry Goldwater were alive today, the Republican Party would be calling him a Socialist. Of course, they call EVERYONE a Socialist now.
They called Bill Clinton (whose signature policies were welfare reform, a balanced budget, banking deregulation, and free-trade agreements like NAFA and GATT) a Socialist all the time. Such terms have lost all meaning.
Christie wasn’t so moderate when he threw Bridget Kelly under the bus. That was after, he shamed, shunned and announced she’d been dumped.
Christie’s treatment of teachers and other public employees, whose only crime is hard work and a lack of friends like Adelson, and Koch and Walton heirs, is just like his treatment of Kelly. Under the Bus.
I agree with you @jackmtalbot:
Not only is it bipartisan stupidity…it is bipartisan insanity.
We now have the inmates running the asylum!
Mimi,
It’s not stupidity nor insanity. It’s quite cunning and very rational thinking. The Blue team and the Red Team are doing the bidding of those who put them in office- big business. And those who put them in office do so for this very reason.
As for the American political spectrum we now have a system that is in every meaningful sense a hard right bureaucratic system.
People were under the impression that simply because a black man with good diction was to be in the Offal Office that things would be different. The policies of such neo-liberals being further to the right than Nixon did not seem to trouble these staunch supporters of the New Democrats. Many of us warned of this as early as 2006 – and before.
Red and blue. The colors of two rival gangs whose heated opposition to one another is a squabble over who gets the graft.
I think we lump all of the bad and what good there is under one title of ‘common core.’ There are great many things in the ELA and History/SS standards that I do like. When they were released I was happy to work with my teachers to integrate them into the current content. But things went awry with the lack of an editing process, coerced adoption, PARCC/SBAC, teacher evalution, and data collection. I don’t think that common standards are a bad idea. I think our implementation of them and the stakes we’ve attached to them are awful. Its not as simple as for and against (although when has the complexity of politics or education ever been respected).
As a former teacher and department head, I have written curriculum for districts, historical associations, and other organizations. I’ve integrated CCSS into that writing and into my most current work with SS teachers focused on student writing. It could have been good, I really think that. But the fear is palpable. Good people, the teachers and administrators, are held hostage to testing and even when they know better, they prep and prep and prep somemore.
I’m afraid for my child who is not yet in Kindergarten. We are currently looking at Montessori schools just to shield him from what the state and DOE hath wrought.
Your Momma
Diane, thank you for your blog and your resolve to share information about Common Core! It has been a heartbreaking year for our family since our district’s full implementation of Common Core. I have a question that I am hoping you can answer. You mentioned in your 2014 speech, Everything You Need To Know About Common Core, that 27 people were involved in writing the Core Standards. Aside from a few names (David Coleman, William MaCullam, Phil Daro, Jason Zimba, Susan Pimental…) and the obvious companies involved (Gates, Pearson, NGA, CCSSO…), I can’t find WHO wrote the standards.
Who are the 27 people? I cannot find a list anywhere.
Michelle, the secrecy surrounding the Common Core writing committee is indicative of the lack of transparency with which they were developed. Just as a matter of process, this is wrong. Nearly half the writing committee were representatives of the College Board, ACT, and other testing companies. I don’t know their names. If anyone has the list of the Secret 27, please send it and I will post it.
Thank you, Diane, for your response. Sadly, it was the answer I was expecting. I would think that if a person helps create a “product” then they would stand behind that product and have no problem attaching their name to it. The fact that these 27 people are hesitant to come forward and lay claim to their participation makes me think that they knew, from the start, it was going to receive a great amount of backlash and/or that is was going to fail.
My two daughters, 4th and 1st grades, could be considered ‘poster children’ for the horrific consequences of all the Common Core testing. My 4th grader (although top of her class) has been suffering with sleepless nights/perpetual stomachaches/nausea/vomiting/anxiety since the increased intensity of Common Core curriculum and assessments. My 1st grader has completely shut down. After months of trying to reach what Common Core curriculum and tests deem as success, she has been crushed and given up.
I taught kindergarten before I was blessed with children of my own and I am most saddened by the loss of the “teachable moment” in our classrooms. The structured, scripted and rigorous lessons which teach to the test have absolutely stopped the cultivation of passionate teaching and enthusiastic learning. Like I said, it’s been a heartbreaking year, both as a former educator and ESPECIALLY as a mom.
Thank you, again, for your dedication to informing the public with your blog!
Someone posted this link from the Pioneer Institute:
pioneerinstitute.org/featured/watch-building-the-machine-new-common-core-movie/
The video is well worth watching. It will tell you how common core came about. I don’t agree with all of it, but I think it is an honest assessment. I’m sorry I cannot give credit to the original poster.
Thank you for that video, 2old2teach! Fascinating.
Dear Michelle:
The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in ELA appear to have been written by the members of a small town Rotary Club–owners of local insurance agencies, automobile dealerships, and hair salons–based on what they vaguely remembered of their English classes from back in the day. They were instructed to look at the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the existing standards and to come up with a list of “stuff to do in English classes.” It seems that they didn’t bother consulting anyone with any knowledge of, say, literature, rhetoric, linguistics, composition, research methods, media, logic, the cognitive sciences of language acquisition and learning, or any other relevant fields. The thinking seems to have been, “We all studied English in high school, so we know what we need to know.”
At least, they READ as if that were so.
It also has the full support of Governor Dannel Malloy, the CT State Board of Education, Stefan Pryor, and both the CEA and AFT, each so-called democrats. This has gone far beyond party affiliation.
Bill,
These are not “so-called” Democrats they are Democrats as they are and as they have always been.
The Democratic Party plays an indispensable role in society’s political machinery. This doesn’t mean it has any power, in terms of controlling the state or setting policy. It means that without the existence of the Dem Party, the US could no longer maintain the pretense that it’s a “democracy.” If the Dem Party disintegrated, the US would be revealed for what it really is — a one-party state ruled by a narrow alliance of business interests.
The party’s true function is thus largely theatrical. It doesn’t exist to fight for change, but only to pose as a force which one fine distant day might possibly bestir itself to fight for change. Thus the whole magic of the Dem Party — the essential service it renders to the US power structure — lies not in what it does, but in its mere existence: by simply existing, and doing nothing, it pretends to be something it’s not; and this is enough to relieve despair & to let the system portray itself as a “democracy.”
As long as the Dem Party exists, most Americans will believe we have a “democracy” and a “choice” in how we are ruled. They will not despair, and will not revolt, as long as they have this hope for “change within the system.” From the system’s point of view, this mechanism serves as the ultimate safety valve — it insures against a despairing populace, thus eliminates the threat of rebellion; yet guarantees that no serious change to the system will be mounted, because the Dems weren’t designed to play that role in the first place.
The Democrats are not the “lesser evil;” they are an auxiliary subdivision of the same evil. To understand the political system, one must step back and regard its operation as an integrated whole. The system can’t be properly understood if one’s study of it begins with an uncritical acceptance of the 2-party system, and the conventional characterizations of the two parties. (Indeed, the fact that society encourages one to view it in this latter way, is perhaps a warning that this perspective should not be trusted.)
The Democrats are permitted to exist because their vague hint of eventual progressive change keeps large numbers of people from bolting the political system altogether. Emma Goldman once said, “If voting made a difference, it would be illegal.” Similarly, if the Democrats potentially threatened any sort of serious change, they would be banned. The fact that they are fully accepted by the corporations and political establishment tells us at once that their ultimate function must be wholly in line with the interests of those ruling groups.
For the Democratic Party to even begin to serve as a vehicle for opposing the absolute rule of capital, it would at minimum have to be capable of acknowledging that the conflict exists between the interests of capital and the rest of the population; and of expressing a principled determination to take the side of the population in this conflict.
A party whose controlling elements are millionaires, lobbyists, fund-raisers, careerist apparatchiks, consultants, and corporate lawyers; that has stood by prostrate and helpless (when not actively collaborating) in the face of privatization, illegal wars, torture, CIA concentration camps, lies as state policy, and one assault on the Bill of Rights after the next, is not likely to take that position.
I use the term “so-called” because these people and organizations have deviated and betrayed their traditional power base. Democrats are historically pro-Union; the Unions are traditionally pro-worker. Yet, the Malloy administration is one of the most anti-union governors in American history, and the state teacher’s unions are certainly not fighting for their membership. Instead, by supporting CCSS, the Smarter Balance tests, the unfair teacher evaluation system imposed upon us by Malloy with union complicity, I cannot, in fairness, call these real Democrats. They are part of a larger party I call the Democrapublicans, dedicated to corporate interests at the expense of the people.
Please do not confuse the issue; this is not a discourse on the merits of the Democrat Party. It is a condemnation of those who will hide themselves in Democrat clothing to cause the decay of the principles of this party.
The party’s true function is thus largely theatrical.
Yup
Bill,
Your historical view of who the Democrats are is inaccurate. There is no betrayal here. What you see is what you get.
Better to understand the system as a whole than to remain lost in the Kabuki.
Thank you Michael for this excellent explication on the Dem Party. When our dulcet toned Prez announced Max Baucus to oversee financial change, after choosing as his close advisors Summers and Rubin. Rahm and Immelt, it was crystal clear he was not in any way a progressive. All your words mirror my thinking.
Michael,
Your discourse on the Democratic Party relies on sweeping generalizations, hoary and cynical stereotypes and an intellectual laziness that cannot see fine—but crucial—distinctions.
Since my high school days I’ve spent more time arguing with people like yourself who not only think voting is a “waste of time” but that it actually makes things worse, “because you’re encouraging people to take part in a fraudulent, deceptive, destruction system and it makes them confused and passive when that same energy could be used to tear the system down…blah blah blah…”
And then RichardNixonRonaldReaganBush&Bush WinWinWinandCheatButStillWin…blah blah blah…
You’re obviously pretty clever and smart; so much so that it makes me wonder if you’re not actually working for the bad guys, the extreme conservatives that now run the Republican Party.
Why? Because if I was a Republican, nothing would make me happier than some “leftist intellectual” preaching to his fellow progressives and those who might lean towards them that “There’s no difference between the two major parties…blah blah blah…and the Democrats are just there as “window dressing” and that BECAUSE of the Democrats pretending that they represent “change”, they’re actually hurting “REAL” revolution by hoodwinking all that revolutionary energy and defusing it by turning these future Che and Ho Chi Minh types into people knocking on doors to hand out campaign literature.
And your efforts are particularly “helpful” (to conservatives) in states like Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina and others, where any effort to reduce Democratic turnout would be much appreciated by union busters, public education haters and those who think that climate change is just a “hoax.”
The fact are this: Until the advent of television—where very expensive TV advertising became The Standard for effective campaigns that WON—non-Southern Democrats WERE a progressive organization that DID serve as a vehicle for opposing the absolute rule of capital. It also WAS capable of acknowledging that the conflict exists between the interests of capital and the rest of the population; and it expressed a principled determination to take the side of the working population in that conflict.
Campaigns became WAY more expensive and candidates soon found out how much more effective TV was compared to anything else. Ugly guys couldn’t run and win…(okay, Chris Christie does demolish that theory but…it still tends to hold true that you have to be “telegenic” or “attention getting”—and Christie has the latter sewed up.
In an effort not to get devastated like they did on Election Night 1980, and other times, the Democrats were lobbied heavily by business interests—including many from the new “cool, hip non-polluting” knowledge sector, who were actually sold as “liberal” based on their youth, memories of JFK, tolerance of gays, lovers of The Beatles, Stones and even Grateful Dead, and an admission of “youthful indiscretion” for smoking pot, even if they “didn’t inhale.”
These were the guys that were going to “balance out” the gray, old, cranky, Vietnam War Supporting “Dinosaurs” like George Meany—who, incidentally always looked and sounded like his name to Baby Boomer Kids—and the other old crabs who hated long hair, rock music and all that dope and noise and Woodstock!!!
“Crazy, insane, nasty” Al Shanker was the face of teacher unionism in those days. Now, there might be a way for big city Democrats to push them out of the way, with the new sources of money from the blown-dry “Democrats” from the “high tech sector”.
Those old polluting industries and their crabby old union leaders would no longer have to be accommodated. We can win without them.
But of course, THEY were not winning anymore; The Democrats of Wilson, FDR, Truman, Stevenson, Humphrey JFK and LBJ were gone; never to come back. After Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the things he became most noted for pushing, right off the bat, were a pro-corporate, Rube Goldberg-type “health care plan”—directly abandoning the Democrats decades-long support of single payer plans like the Veterans Administration and Medicare, pushed hard by Ted Kennedy since the 60’s—and NAFTA, with Al Gore leading the charge.
So you’re wrong. If you can’t tell the differences between the Democratic Party of 1964 and 2014, you’re either confused or just tied to a quasi-religious belief in your slipshod narrative.
And when it comes to 2014, I think you have a bit of work to do as well. If you were a first year undergraduate and you passed in a paper that spoke about “the Democrats” the way you’ve done here, you’d be graded accordingly.
While the Republicans, more than ever, walk in lockstep to a far-right agenda—where the only “disputes” are between the ones who are so far right that they’ll even sometimes criticize certain corporate supporters, the Democrats are far different.
Or are you going to say that Cory “I Love Wall Street and Charters” Booker is “no different” from Dennis Kucinich? Similarly, is Bernie Sanders “no different” from Joe Lieberman? Is Andrew Cuomo “the same” as Bill de Blasio? Is there “no difference” between the odious Jared Polis—the poster boy for public school privatization—and Jim McDermott, who will fight such efforts tooth and nail?
Do you REALLY think that the truly awful Lanny Davis—former Bill Clinton aide who heads up a lobbying firm that represents foreign governments guilty of egregious human rights violations—is “exactly the same” as the thousands of Democrats actively supporting Amnesty International?
Please.
I’m not saying there aren’t any good points in what you’ve written. I agree with much of it. If you had simply qualified it a bit more to say “the CURRENT controllers” of the Democratic Party or “the Obama administration” etc, and showing acknowledgement of the fine but crucial distinctions in all of this, I would have agreed with much of what you wrote.
But when you’re essentially telling people to stay away from voting, and that voting Democratic is “only helping to maintain a system of oppression”, you’re losing me, just as the guy with the black beret with the little red star, holding up a copy of “The Militant” in the early 70’s lost me when he told me that George McGovern would probably even be WORSE than Nixon because it would then send otherwise “revolutionary” cab drivers, autoworkers and beauticians back to sleep instead of working actively, in their off hours, for a “truly” revolutionary workers paradise.
Blah blah blah…
I’m not staying home on Election Day. I’ll vote for the “lesser wing of evil” as you call it. It might save lives, including my own.
Time to vote Socialist . . . or at least a third party.
And, Michael, my historic view of the Democrats is very accurate. Read a book about it sometime.
Super-liberal, mandate-wielding, great progressive hope Bill de Blasio supports Common Core, as does his hand-picked schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña. Maybe they’ll be added to the flow-chart in v2.0.
You got everything right except for the “super-liberal” and “great progressive hope” parts. No more true than when those things were believed about Barack Obama.
A slightly different take on the title of this posting.
For the point I am about to make, I would reword it “Who Supports Commoners Core For Other People’s Children?”
Let’s look at, literally, a few of the inner circle of CC producers, promoters, and pushers of this eduproduct who send THEIR OWN CHILDREN to schools that are not, and will not, be adopting said eduproduct—
Link: http://www.sidwell.edu [Barack Obama]
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org [Bill Gates]
Link: http://www.delbarton.org [Chris Christie]
Link: http://www.harpethhall.org [Michelle Rhee]
Link: http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu [Rahm Emanuel]
And then there’s the wee bit of self-serving hypocrisy of Dr. Candace McQueen who may be the biggest CC promoter in Tennessee but when she recently became head of the private Lipscomb Academy—well, gloryosky!—just look at this excerpt from a letter to the parents of Lipscomb parents:
[start quote]
… I have also not been in any discussions about formal adoption of the CCSS at Lipscomb Academy. Currently, Lipscomb Academy draws from a variety of quality national and state standards selected by the school leadership and faculty to set a vision for what content, instruction and curriculum will be used at each grade level. This has proven to be effective; thus, I don’t anticipate any changes to this process now or in the future. As is current practice, all standards available will be reviewed at set intervals by leadership and faculty to determine the direction of Lipscomb Academy.
[end quote]
Click on link below for more context.
Link: http://nashvillepublicradio.org/blog/2014/02/10/lipscomb-academy-chief-advocates-for-common-core-but-not-at-her-school/
If only, only for once, the self-styled “education reformers” would abandon their diehard commitment to Marxist principles:
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
¿Again? The famous one, of course, Groucho.
😎
Keep on testifyin’, Brother Krazy!
Amusing:
Stephanie Simon @StephanieSimon_ 2h
US Chamber has new #CommonCore video w/ promo quote frm @BobbyJindal — who just backed a bill to scrap the standards http://www.politico.com/morningeducation/ …
Hacktastic! Now they’re contradicting themselves.
These are the “adults in the room”. Remember that. “Who’s on first?”
I’m rooting for injuries in the fight between Arne Duncan and Jeb Bush versus Bobby Jindal, myself.
In the fight between Bobby Jindal and Bobby Jindal on the Common Core, I don’t know which Jindal to root for.
Isn’t it great how this is “all about the kids”?
Likewise, the biggest enemies of the PARCC and SBAC are PARCC and SBAC.
These tests are so poorly conceptualized that right now, as we speak, people across the country, giving the field tests, are reacting with shock and anger. There’s never been a comparable event in the history of U.S. education.
ultimately?
Common [sic] Core [sic] is supported by
the educational materials monopolists and would-be monopolists
who paid for it (who wrote and continued to write the checks for it)
in order to sell billions of dollars in educational technology and
to have something to tag their educational software to
so that they could create Big Databases
that Open Source textbook authors would not have access to
so that they could prevent Open Source textbooks
like those now appearing in the college textbook publishing arena
from appearing in K-12 educational publishing as well and
from doing to them what Wikipedia did to the Encyclopedia Britannica
and what video did to the radio star.
The Big Data model made possible by having a single national bullet list of standards is an EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS MONOPOLIST PROTECTION PROGRAM.
And, incidentally, it dramatically lowers the ed materials monopolists’ costs because the big costs of traditional textbooks are for paper, printing, binding, sampling, warehousing, and shipping.
The story of the birth of the Common [sic] Core [sic] is not an education story. It’s a business story.
And the Educrats and Politicians who have gotten behind the Common [sic] Core [sic], unaware of this, have been totally PLAYED, or as gamers say, these days, pwned.
I admit to feeling embarrassment for the rare English teacher I encounter who supports the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] for English Language Arts. I feel, in the presence of such a person, the same way I feel when I’m listening to a speech and the speaker is mispronouncing one of his or her key terms over and over again.
Many years ago, there was a teachers’ strike in Chicago, and the Chicago Public Schools administrators were conducting classes for students over the radio. One day, I, a young man then, was listening to one of these programs, and some administrator was going on and on about “Jenn-ruhs” of literature. Hey, it happens. People mispronounce things.
But still, I listen to someone defending the breathtakingly uninformed, puerile, backward, hackneyed, confused, pedestrian, unimaginative, prescientific Common Core in ELA with the same sort of embarrassment for the other person that I felt for that administrator. I want to pass the person a note: Psst, your fly is open. Psst: there’s a piece of lettuce stuck in your teeth. Psst, you’re making a fool of yourself. Here: read this. And this. And this.
Most English teachers, of course, know how lame, how amateurish the CC$$ in ELA are. Many, unfortunately, are afraid to say what they know, for Ed Deform has created a climate of fear of the kind that one finds in an occupied state. Think Vichy France.
I admit to having a heuristic for determining if someone knows the first thing about teaching English: I simply find out whether he or she is on the Common [sic] Core [sic] in ELA pom pon squad. Then I know with whom I am dealing, and I know to speak slowly and to use very simple words and concepts. Lexile level 4 or 5 at most.
I must say that I am FURIOUS at our country’s professors of literature, rhetoric, linguistics, logic, philosophy, and cognitive science for not speaking out about the stupidity of the CC$$ in ELA.
The students in their classes, in a few years, will be ones who were prepared under the CC$$ regime.
Intellectuals have a responsibility to engage on matters of public policy that involve their fields. Climate scientists have a responsibility to weigh in on anthropogenic climate change, for example.
Similarly, professors of linguistics who actually know something about child language acquisition have a responsibility to explain to people how cluelessly prescientific the language strands of the CC$$ are, how like telling science teachers that they must teach about the phlogiston that causes fire, about the ether that fills empty space, about how to build perpetual motion machines, and about how objects in motion come to rest once they use up their inherent motive force.
If the CC$$ in ELA had been subjected to any learned critique, the authors of them would long ago have been laughed off the national stage.
You are so correct, Bob, about professors speaking out…or not. Steve Kashen, USC emeritus, speaks out all the time…we were on a radio interview show together a few months ago and he was terrific, though he purposts these days to prefer to spend time working out at Venice’s Muscle Beach in his gym.
However, the Blue and Gold profs silence at UCLA is deafening.
As a public policy specialist, i share your belief that intellectuals have not only a responsibility to engage, but also that they should have courage to face the reality of this onslaught of the Phillistines.
Sorry…meant “purports” ,,,
Thanks, Ellen. Krashen brings plenty of intellectual muscle to this battle, as do you. 🙂
cx: Kashen. Tired here after a long night’s writing.
What Happens When Amateurs Write “Standards”:
I don’t understand the problem with the Common Core Standards for Mathematics. IF THEY WERE PROPERLY IMPLEMENTED AND IF THERE WERE NO HIGH-STAKES TESTS, they would be a pathway for children to learn mathematics well.
Saying the Common Core is the problem is deflecting the public from the real issue—how does one measure student achievement according to our values of a public education and an educated citizenry. What is the real job of a teacher? Can any metric be created that measures this accurately?
I am also disturbed by the inference that accepting money from an educational foundation automatically distorts an objective purpose. Educational research and program development is not funded by state legislatures. To meet operating expenses in today’s world, universities depend on the grants that professors pursue from these foundations.
Joanne, if they were voluntary guidelines, and if scholars and researchers and curriculum developers and teachers and administrators were able to adapt them or to use competing, alternative learning progressions if they believed that these better served the interests of their particular students, then the Common Core State Standards would be a contribution to ongoing work toward refining our practice. But they are not voluntary. They mandate a one-size-fits-all, particular learning progression and tell everyone else in education, your ideas about what learning progressions should look like ARE NOW MOOT. We shall do this thinking for you now.
Joanne,
Two hundred U.S. universities take money from the Koch’s. Often, the money funds a course in Darwinian economics. The course content was not in the professor-designed curriculum, prior to Koch funding. And, it wouldn’t currently be, without the Koch payment.
To my knowledge, the most egregious restrictions on Koch funding, that were accepted by a university, were at the public, Florida State University, where the Koch’s rights in professor staffing choices were spelled out.
Philosophically, the most distressing example of Koch influence, was at the major Marianist university, in the U.S. They took the money, in spite of their professed core values of social justice.
I have not found an example where the Koch ‘s gave to universities and said, “Spend this for whatever expenses you have.”
Read the most recent issue of Mother Jones article on the Kochs. Dangerous megalomaniacs. And their products are what we all use every day.