But somehow they only find it has a shade on it when it comes from the right, and after its been spent. “Tufts has accepted over $22 million since 1985 from charitable foundations that have openly expressed a desire to promote their political agenda at institutes of higher education, or which have directly funded academically controversial, racially antagonistic research at Tufts, a multiyear Daily investigation has discovered,” David Nickerson reported in The Tufts Daily on November 26, 2018.
See if you can find the “racially antagonistic research” in the story. Nickerson writes that “The seven foundations included in this report are the John M. Olin Foundation, which gave $1,626,051; the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which gave $7,620,000; The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which gave $1,018,250; the John Templeton Foundation, which gave $6,699,828; the Earhart Foundation, which gave $1,413,008; the Smith Richardson Foundation, which gave $1,193,017; and the Charles Koch Foundation, which pledged to donate $3,000,000 over a six-year period beginning in 2017.” Yet and still, beyond the Koch Foundation’s insistence on interviewing and approving the people who would be overseeing the center it was funding, Nickerson relays no strings attached.
Nevertheless, although that proviso may look draconian from an academic perspective, it should be noted that institutions of higher learning have a long history of turning donor’s original intent inside out, bating at least as far back as the Bass grant to Yale. Indeed, veteran Washington, D. C. journalist Martin Morse Wooster has made something of a career of chronicling the bait ans switch games universities play with their donors.
