Students are seeing right through Charles and David Koch. Last week, a University of Wisconsin student called out the Kochs’ selfish agenda and decried their sponsorship of the school’s athletic program. This week, a University of Maryland student, Daniel Alarcon, suggested that the Kochs may be using donations to the university to “[advance] their political agenda.”
“Considering the Koch brothers have announced that they will donate a total of almost $900 million during this presidential election cycle, it is unlikely that they would donate to our school without any contractual stipulations,” writes Alarcon in an opinion for The Diamondback.
Such Koch “stipulations,” Alarcon continues, have in the past included giving “the industrialists unprecedented influence over [beneficiary universities’] programs, such as faculty hiring and veto power.” And the two brothers’ previous attempts to exert influence over such institutions has run political and ideological as well, Alarcon points out: “[T]hey’ve even funded similar programs to deny climate change.”
The Kochs can keep throwing money around, and attempt to hijack higher education curriculae, but their propaganda-peddling isn’t working — students are seeing straight through them and fighting back.
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