The coronavirus may give private donors more say over public colleges' classes and professors, observers worry. Secrecy is the norm across the U.S.
Long before the coronavirus hit the United States, cash-strapped public higher education systems looked to private donors to offset the steady decline in public funding, sometimes with significant secrecy and strings attached.
Linda Durant, vice president of development for the Council for Advancement and Support of Education , said she has seen some encouraging signs that those donating to public universities now are simply being generous during trying times. “There will be cables attached to it. ‘You have to play our game, put together a center and institute and hire the people we want you to hire,’ ” he said. “You are ending up with a curriculum and faculty that has a debt to a corporation. What kind of education will you end up with?”
If faculty hired with such donations are tenured, a withdrawal would leave the university on the hook to pay their salaries. These organizations, usually set up as private nonprofits, are designed to collect and distribute money for the public universities. While funds often are designated for specific programs, the foundations also raise money for general scholarships and other needs for low- and moderate-income students.
In an amicus brief in a recent lawsuit involving George Mason University’s foundation, a group of university foundations said “anything that threatens donor confidentiality will ultimately disadvantage Virginia’s public colleges and universities” in the competition for dollars. Smith’s requests were rejected after the university said it did not have the documents and referred him to its foundation. The foundation said it was not required under state open records laws to provide them.
Gift giving also has opened up the potential for conflicts of interest. In 2004, news reports said that 14 companies that had contracts with the University of Georgia System donated $114,000 to the University of Georgia Foundation fund to supplement the chancellor’s salary for three years. Secretive donations with strings from private donors to public universities and university entities have drawn criticism at other universities, including Clemson in South Carolina, University of Louisville, Utah State and West Virginia University.
The difference between the two, in the eyes of the law, is key to understanding who must disclose what. Not only are many of these entities housed on campus but their staff often includes employees who hold publicly funded positions on the university’s payroll. “Incident after incident on campus after campus demonstrate that university foundations can fail miserably in monitoring themselves,” wrote Scott Reinardy and Charles Davis.
“For education and research and science to have any value it has to be governed by academic merit,” McCluskey said, “independent of who is buying and selling in the market.” Controversy also arose over a $20 million donation from an anonymous donor, and $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation that included renaming the law school for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative appointed by President Ronald Reagan.
The controversy reached the Virginia Supreme Court, which in December 2019 ruled that George Mason’s foundation could keep its donation details private. The donor’s identity cannot be kept secret if the donations impose terms or conditions that “direct academic decision making.” “We are not talking about run-of-the-mill donations,” she noted, “only those that are trying to steer the direction of the university.”
In turn, the data on the 990 forms show that the university foundation gave $24 million to The Mercatus Center there, a nonprofit think tank that promotes the libertarian economic philosophy espoused by the Koch family.
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