Blueprints for protecting academic freedom from dark money donations

Retracted: Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor pressure in political science, economics, and philosophy

“…The intrusion of "dark money" has been associated with the redirection of academe away from its mission to advance the public good and toward political advocacy in the service of wealthy and unaccountable interests. In addition to intruding upon the academic freedom of faculty (Banks, 2020), Koch money has weaponized the legal-juridical ecologies of academe through the so-called "Law and Economics" movement-a 70-year plus program to reshape the federal judiciary in a rightward direction (Van Horn, 2018) that, after its origins at the University of Chicago, shifted its attention to training seminar for federal judges run out of George Mason (Walsh, 2019).…”

“…Even as the political shock of Trumpism in 2016 directed attention to the electoral operations of the Koch network, the "only book-length academic study of the Koch foundations" imprint upon higher education is MacLean (2017). The ability of faculty to detect and organize against Koch intrusions on campus (Banks, 2020) currently suffers from the resulting inattention, and especially the lack of data to demonstrate the mechanisms of the same intrusion.…”