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Faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin still have many questions about the Liberty Institute, a think tank that appears to be coming to campus. That is also after the university director broached the subject at a recent faculty council meeting.
What else do professors want to know?
“Anything,” said Domino Renee Perez, chairman of the faculty board at UT Austin and associate professor of English. “The faculty needs to hear directly from the president as he is the one who identified this as a priority for the university.”
Most professors first learned about the Liberty Institute idea late last month when an investigation by the Texas Tribune found college leaders had worked with private donors and Republican Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick for eight months to bring it up Bring to market. Internal proposals describe the institute as “dedicated to the study and teaching of individual freedom, limited government, private business and free markets,” the article says.
The Tribune found that Texas lawmakers had already approved $ 6 million in initial funding for the institute in the 2022-23 state budget. The university reportedly pledged an additional $ 6 million, and a private donor promised a center $ 8.5 million in documents received through Open Records Requests back in 2016.
The article names Jay Hartzell, president of UT Austin, as involved in the project, along with Patrick and Kevin Eltife, a Republican former senator who has been appointed by the Republican governor for a second term on the University System of Texas Board of Regents this year Gregor Abbott was appointed. Donors Bud Brigham and Bob Rowling, both conservatives, are also involved, according to the report.
Following the Tribune report, faculty members sought more information about the project and expressed concern that lawmakers are allocating money to an academic endeavor that few, if any, professors know about.
Council members, for example, presented the university with a list of eight questions, including whether the Tribune’s accounts are correct and how the institute will maintain freedom of thought and faculty governance. What will the institute offer that is not already available or possible within the framework of existing programs in law, government, business and the public, the council also asked. How exactly is the institute financed and are there any conditions attached?
What role will the faculty play, including in faculty recruitment? And how will the center be structured?
Probst Sharon Wood attempted to answer some of these questions at the council meeting earlier this week. However, Wood, who became provost in July, said she had no answers to some of her questions as discussions about the institute had taken place at the president’s office prior to her arrival.
“The goal is to provide students who push traditional boundaries and look at problems from multiple angles,” said Wood. The institute will help students “to understand how regulatory and legal frameworks will affect the markets. They also have the analytical and quantitative skills to solve complex problems and understand more economic factors. “
Regarding the Tribune’s report, Wood said he “ignored the role of faculty administration and faculty recruitment, and the development of new degree programs, implying that there is no interest among students”. However, she did not share a clear plan for running the faculty or the faculty’s role in hiring.
Jeffrey Abramson, professor of government and law, said after the meeting, “The normal thing for a self-respecting university, once it has raised the money for the institute, would be to go to the regular faculty and strengthen it. exercising academic freedom to make recruitment and curriculum decisions. ”Abramson said the possibility that the institute could“ stand outside the normal way in which mature universities make academic decisions is a threat to the integrity of the UT and gives too much power to private donors over who teaches what to our students ”.
Centers devoted to the study of free enterprise, individual freedom, and restricted government exist elsewhere. Many are funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and seen by their supporters as a counterpoint to the less conservative systems and approaches that students encounter in class. The BB&T Bank Foundation has also offered colleges and universities grants from Moral Foundations, which purported to offer courses or provide a copy of Ayn Rand’s free-market novel, Atlas Shrugged, to students. In some cases, these grants were linked to teacher recruitment provisions. For example, a 2011 advertisement from Western Carolina University stated that applicants for their BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism “should at least be familiar, if not actively receptive, with the writings of Ayn Rand.” Also in 2011 it became known that Koch scholarship contracts at several universities provide for the foundation to have a say in the appointment of lecturers. A third institution, George Mason University, said in 2018 that some of their previous agreements with Koch included donor impact on teacher recruitment.
Since then, Koch has said that academic freedom has always been valued and that we have consciously turned away from such a language of agreement. A template for current donor agreements has also been published. BB&T has also ended its Ayn Rand-based program of focusing on finance-based philanthropy.
Faculties’ concerns about these centers remain, aside from the issue of donor influence in recruiting faculties. Proponents of academic freedom fear, for example, that the underfunding of higher education in particular endangers public institutions from compromising the faculties’ rights to secure private funding. The state of Texas appears to have committed to funding this particular project, but that raises eyebrows too, as politicians may know more about it than professors.
Another concern is that these institutes can be used as academic research to promote political ideas. Stanford University immunologists, for example, were concerned about Scott Atlas, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, when he questioned the effectiveness of wearing masks as a coronavirus advisor to Trump’s White House. Atlas did not work directly for Hoover in that capacity, but his academic credentials, including his medical degree, were often cited in his public comments.
Elsewhere, faculty members have declined proposed centers on the grounds that they would compete with existing academic faculties, particularly economics.
The Hoover Institution is reportedly a model for the UT Austin Institute. Wood also said at the council meeting that Tom Gilligan, former dean of McCombs School of Business at UT Austin, had helped plan the Liberty Institute before going to the Hoover Institute in 2015, Hoover did not answer a question about Hoover on Thursday.
Abramson said Americans are “divided in the current political climate and rightly arguing about the right balance between individual freedom and the public good.” He fears, however, that while the Liberty Institute “promises to bring diversity of thought to campus, it will in fact only promote one side of this important debate in its hiring and course decisions.”
However, not all professors are as skeptical about the Liberty Institute as they understand it to be. Richard Lowery, an associate professor of finance, said during the council meeting that he was confused by some of the criticisms that the university is already funding various programs that are “explicitly political,” including social justice and diversity, equality and inclusion efforts.
Lowery declined an interview request, but made the following written statement:
The administration of the University of Texas at Austin, with the enthusiastic support of the faculty, has implemented a diversity, equity and inclusion plan, the original version of which was outlined by the foundation [for] Individual rights in education as follows: “[T]The mandates of the proposal pose a serious risk of introducing a point of view litmus test for both recruitment and promotion, “with the final version, in my opinion, being as bad or worse than the original draft. Thus, not only are the alleged concerns about a political test in a potential “Liberty Institute” hypocritical, but in view of these explicit and many implicit political tests at the university, it is absolutely necessary to have a structure at the UT. -Austin, where academic freedom can be restored. While I support the principle of establishing such a structure, the provost’s plan is clearly designed to transfer control of such a unit to the existing faculty, which is generally opposed to academic freedom, and therefore would only serve as a fig leaf. “
Daniel Brinks, government chairman, said he knew little about the institute but had heard that it could be a cluster appointment of faculty members covering areas such as collective decision-making, government regulation and its impact on economic and other outcomes and market design explore and social welfare and drivers of social prosperity.
To himself he said, “I can imagine our department would support a hiring within this cluster, depending on how the scope of the cluster is defined and how well it fits our priorities and disciplinary standards.” And as with “everyone Recruitment, “he said,” I’m sure we would all expect our normal governance processes to be respected, including our normal role in selecting the faculty we recruit. “
JB Bird, spokesman for the university, said he was consulting with the provost office on a request for comment or an interview. Later that day, he shared a link to a new bullet-style information page about the institute. Bird highlighted the following point: “All new professors are hired under normal university protocols that include deans and professors.” create a list of new courses that can be added. “
Bird added that the institute was “still in the planning stages”.
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