Wake Forest Faculty Can’t Derail Koch-Funded Institute

, Spencer Irvine, Leave a comment

The Charles Koch Foundation-funded Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University has made it past its first year and college faculty have been unable to derail its efforts and mission:

Still, professors found reason to nitpick small details. One example is the objection that the Charles Koch Foundation* is not listed as a donor on the institute’s website. Faculty have yet to raise the same concern over other institutes at Wake Forest that do not list their donors.

Moreover, the institute website’s “news” section contains a link to the university’s press release that identifies the Koch Foundation as having given a large grant to Wake Forest for the Eudaimonia Institute. That link has been on the website since it was first created, early last fall.

Faculty members, in a report on the matter by an “Academic Freedom” subcommittee, also continued to express concern that the center is an attempt to infect the curriculum with free market ideas and convince students to support right-leaning political causes, even going so far as to call it “parasitical” and suggest the school’s accreditation could be on the line.