This week’s substack is stacked with new research about education, so let’s jump right in.
Charles Koch and the Roots of the Student Debt Crisis
Part 2, Milton Friedman, Charles Koch, and Attacks on Public Funding of Universities
By Caroline Jones and Lisa Graves for True North Research and the BOLD ReThink
The student debt crisis, as described in the first installment of True North Research’s student debt crisis report, is the result of public policy preferences pushed decades ago by free market fundamentalists like the economist Milton Friedman and Charles Koch, the son of an extremist. These men planted and nurtured seeds of selfishness that attacked the very idea of public funding of higher education (as well as public primary and secondary public schools, but that is a separate story).
In this second installment, Friedman and Koch peddle a reactionary agenda to undermine public support for public funding of university education. The partial implementation of that anti-government agenda has weighted down generations of American students with debt that its originators themselves never faced.
Koch has played a singular role in the length, depth, and breadth of his personal engagement in moving fringe ideas into the mainstream through his wealth—ideas that have proven to be exceptionally destructive to the health of our democracy, in our view.
Friedman Urged Student Debt and Whined about “Unfair” Competition with Private Colleges
The credit for providing the first major platform for the idea of student loan debt goes to Milton Friedman, who wrote about it in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom.
Who was Milton Friedman? The right-wing economist attacked the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education striking down racial segregation of school children from a proto-libertarian perspective in Capitalism and Freedom. The year after that ruling, which breathed life into the Constitution’s promise of “equal protection of the laws,” Friedman asserted the real problem was mandatory public education and urged the abolition of public schools. He made these attacks while “in many parts of the South, white citizens' councils organized to prevent compliance. Some of these groups relied on political action; others used intimidation and violence.”
In that 1955 article, Friedman argued that U.S. law should be subordinate to the “free market,” which would allow parents to choose “exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools.” That was the same year that Rosa Parks was arrested and charged for refusing to give up her seat and sit in the back of a racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Friedman claimed to personally oppose government forced segregation as well as government forced integration.
Friedman would later go on to win a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences that was created in 1969 by a Swedish bank. He helped indoctrinate generations as a leader of what became known as the “Chicago school of economics.” Friedman and his wife spent decades undermining public schools through pushing for privatization and vouchers for private schools.
“Capitalism and Freedom.” His 1962 book attacked public universities because of “their relative cheapness,” which he complained created “’unfair’ competition” with private universities. He objected to any subsidy for public universities but asserted that if there were a subsidy it should be provided to private colleges too. He also argued that public universities should charge more “fees covering educational costs and so compete on an equal level with nongovernmental supported schools.”
That is, Friedman’s concern was full of sympathy for private colleges while he staunchly opposed the idea of affordable state colleges. He was seemingly more concerned with the private sector’s interests than the lives of ordinary people seeking higher education.
How could students from lower and middle economic classes pay for these more expensive public universities if they or their families were unable to pay the tuition up front?
Friedman’s answer: debt.
His description of the human impact of this scheme is staggering in its amorality, in our view:
“In a nonslave state, the individual embodying the investment cannot be bought and sold. Even if he could, the security would not be comparable [to investing in a factory]. The productivity of the physical capital does not in general depend on the cooperativeness of the original borrower. The productivity of the human capital quite obviously does. A loan to finance the training of an individual who has no security to offer than his future earnings is therefore a much less attractive proposition than a loan to finance the erection of a building: the security is less, and the cost of subsequent collection of interest and principle is very much greater.” (emphasis added)
Friedman’s contention that public investment in education provided no cognizable value to a civil society is representative of his indifference to the adverse consequences to human beings of the political economy he helped build.
Namely, his dream was an America full of “free market” private schools at all levels rather than universal public education at any level. And he was later rewarded for such theories and ambitions, not just with a newly-invented Nobel Prize but as a hero of right-wing politicos who shared his fringe beliefs and agenda. Back in 1962, though, shortly after his book’s release, Friedman was lesser known.
Notably, in his book, he argued that the interest rate for student loans would have to be high, because some students might die before paying back their loans.
He also proposed a kind of indentured servitude via private contracts that would allow a shareholder to buy a “share” of a student’s future earnings for years to come. In some ways that has come to fruition through the securitization of student loan debt.
Friedman also asserted that government loans that were calibrated to secure a sufficient percentage of future earnings would protect against what he called “the perverse redistribution of income” of funding public universities through taxes. Put differently, the economist opposed the economic mobility made possible by public higher education.
Charles Koch Enters the Picture. Back in the 1960s, a scheme like Friedman’s was decidedly unwelcome and not vogue. But there were some few, like Charles Koch, who embraced such fever dreams of libertarianism and helped fertilize them with their wealth.
Koch was 29 when Friedman’s book was published. He did not invent the idea of students taking on debt to finance higher education, but he helped push it and other regressive policies about public education as a young radical cloaked in the respectability of a businessman wearing a suit and tie.
Koch Attends and then Funds the Freedom School, Hotbed of Anarcho-Capitalism
Charles, the second eldest son of a man who made his fortune building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, moved home to Wichita in 1961 to work for his father. Fred Koch was an anti-communist conspiracy theorist who helped found the reactionary John Birch Society (JBS). The JBS attacked President John F. Kennedy, the Supreme Court, and former President and WWII Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower as sympathetic to communism, even after the notorious “red scare” Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, was widely discredited.
After moving back to Wichita, Charles Koch joined JBS, which his father helped govern. He also began working closely with his father’s friend, Robert Love, a fellow industrialist and union-buster. Later, another leader of the John Birch Society, William Grede, would describe Charles as “completely under Bob Love’s influence and control.”
Love had previously led the National Association of Manufacturers and used his contacts with corporate CEOs to expand the reach of the John Birch Society, continue his and Fred Koch’s attacks on unions, and push other pet projects that claimed America was on the brink of communism in the 1960s.
It was Love who in 1963 suggested that Charles and his parents, Fred and Mary Koch, attend a training in Colorado Springs at the “Freedom School.” That was the name of the private educational entity operating on a ranch in the Rocky Mountains used by Robert LeFevre to invite white business leaders to share his theory that the government’s only legitimate role was to protect property. The Freedom School was described in a 1963 TIME article as a “reindoctrination course at the hands of a battery of right-thinking instructors.”
As detailed in Meet Charles Koch’s Brain, “historian Brian Doherty—who has spent most of his adult life on the Koch brothers' payroll—described LeFevre as ‘an anarchist figure who stole Charles Koch's heart.’" LeFevre described himself as an “autotarch,” which he defined to mean self-rule. He preached that all taxes were theft and exalted opposition to almost all government activities as infringing on personal liberty, except for the protection of private property. Under this extreme theory of the Freedom School, it would be immoral to impose taxes to fund public schools and universities.
As Jane Mayer noted in “The Secrets of Charles Koch’s Political Assent,” in Politico: “In 1965, the New York Times described the school as so implacably opposed to the U.S. government, it was proposing that the Constitution be scrapped in favor of one that limited the government’s authority to impose ‘compulsory taxation.’”
In that sense, the Freedom School sought to operationalize a version of Ayn Rand’s selfish theories by indoctrinating businessmen in “philosophy” of viewing democratic government as an enemy of liberty. The wives of the businessmen reportedly could not participate in the classes other than as observers and they were all white people. The New York Times reported that no people of color were allowed due to the segregationists in attendance at Freedom School sessions.
According to correspondence never before published, after Charles Koch’s training trip, Love wrote to LeFevre that Koch wanted to donate money to the Freedom School. Meanwhile, LeFevre corresponded with Koch’s father about the role of the Freedom School in “providing tools to defeat the socialists, communists, and other kinds of collectivists who would destroy our liberty and enslave us.”
Fred Koch, who published extreme claims that communists had infiltrated our government, found LeFevre’s anti-government views too strong. Those views, however, found a receptive audience in the son who would soon take over the family corporations. Charles Koch would later suggest that he thought it was the JBS that was too extreme; his mother even later asserted that Fred too thought the JBS was too extreme, but the family directed memorial donations in Fred Koch’s name to … the JBS.
Enamored by the Freedom School’s anti-government goals, Charles became a trustee of it even as his father became skeptical of its aims. By June 1964, Charles was helping to underwrite its indoctrination operations. Later Charles would say that he “was first exposed in depth” to the Austrian economists Fredrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises through the Freedom School. He also reportedly stocked the JBS bookstore with books by them.
By 1965, Koch was funding the expansion of the Freedom School known as “Rampart College,” with a larger faculty and student body. He even helped break ground on the new venture.
As Jane Mayer noted, LeFevre’s faculty “taught a revisionist version of American history in which the robber barons were heroes, the Gilded Age actually was the country’s golden age and the Civil War shouldn’t have been fought.” As she detailed in Dark Money: “The school had a revisionist position on the Civil War, too. It shouldn’t have been fought, instead, the South should have been allowed to secede. Slavery was a lesser evil than military conscription, the school argued, because human beings should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery if they wished.”
(This would not be Koch’s only foray into revisionist history. For example, there is the under-reported effort of the Koch-funded Reason magazine in 1976 to advance “revisionist historians,” like James J. Martin, as detailed by Mark Ames. Martin had previously been hired by the Freedom School/ Rampart College when Koch was a major donor and board member. Koch even wrote about Martin’s work at the Freedom School in some of his earliest known correspondence, which is excerpted below. Later, Martin became publicly notorious for pedding Holocaust denialism in his writings for the Institute for Historical Review, as noted by Doherty in his book Radicals for Capitalism.)
Notably, like Friedman, Koch has described his politics as “classical liberal,” a moniker that might come as a shock for modern-day Democrats who see almost nothing progressive about Koch and Friedman’s “liberalism.” More accurately, “classical liberal” is a cloak for the economic theories that became known as libertarianism. In 1964, the “classical liberal” Friedman was writing speeches for the GOP’s right-wing presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who lost in a landslide. JBS had tried to recruit Goldwater to run for president under its banner, but he declined.
Correspondence between Koch and LeFevre about the potential for a “true liberalism” in higher education is the earliest known writing by Koch detailing the early formation of his educational and political ideology. This report publishes that correspondence online for the first time. Additional examples of correspondence between Koch and the Freedom School can be found here and here.
Of further interest in these early Koch letters are the seeds of his now-famous strategy of infiltrating higher education to shape educational outcomes by tying funding and professorships to the school’s ability to produce free-market libertarian graduates for the Koch’s “talent pipeline.” UnKoch My Campus has documented this through open records requests to state universities, even as some public universities have tried a range of tactics to keep those details from the public’s eyes.
Specifically, Koch wrote to his fellow Freedom School trustees about whether they should invest in a single college to advance their libertarian theories or whether Rampart would be dismissed as a “propaganda house.” He questioned whether students who graduated would be able to obtain teaching appointments to advance their views at more widely recognized universities, which was his ultimate goal.
He was in his early 30s at the time, but on the verge of becoming the CEO of his father’s company and becoming one of the richest men in America. Steeped in the influence of LeFevre, Love, and the Freedom School, Koch was convinced of the need for a cadre of acolytes to support their liberatarian vision of how America (and the world) should be.
Charles Koch’s musings to LeFevre in this never before published letter are the foundations of what would become the vast vines of Koch influence over higher education in the United States.
This came in part through support for cutting government support for public universities and endorsing student debt as the preferred method for paying for higher education. It came later through his own donations to many public universities in exchange for control over certain academic centers or programs, starting in at least 1981.
It was through the Freedom School that Charles bonded with another young man named George Pearson and invited him to work with him at Koch Industries and in Charles Koch’s special projects. Soon Pearson joined the family business in Wichita that Charles later rebranded as Koch Industries, which is now one of the largest privately held corporations in the history of the world. Pearson acted as Koch’s lieutenant in advancing his ideological agenda through numerous organizations.
As the new Rampart College faltered in the late 1960s, Koch saw other opportunities to execute his own strategies in pursuit of the hegemony of libertarian theories in academia.
In 1968, he created his first known non-profit organization—the Center for Independent Education—through which he launched attacks on public universities and public schools, with Pearson as his point person.
In the next installment of this report, we will detail the higher ed agenda of the Center for Independent Education (CIE). CIE was run out of Koch Industries’ headquarters and in conjunction with a private school advanced by Bob Love. It was located near the Koch family estate and across the street from a racially segregated country club.
Tune in for more details next week. (ICYMI, read Part 1 and see our acknowledgements here.)
Spotlight on IWF: Read the Latest Claims on Critical Race Theory and Its Attacks on Public Schools and Public School Teachers
By Evan Vorpahl and Alyssa Bowen
At the national Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting, a policy analyst with the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), Inez Stepman, spoke on a panel described as “the Left’s effort to destroy America.” That panel focused heavily on critical race theory (CRT), a fairly niche strand of academic writing rooted in legal studies. Well-funded right-wing groups are trying to make a flashpoint of the 2022 election. It is this year’s trumped up “war on Christmas,” as described by columnist Leonard Pitts.
That CPAC panel began with a complaint by the moderator that religious prayers could not be taught in public schools but, purportedly, “racism” can.
IWF has a long history of attacking public schools, public school teachers, and unions. Stepman has been that pay-to-play group’s point person on education policy for about three years.
At CPAC, she began by stating that “where we are now, not to be negative, but is the direct result of the conservative movement and Republic Party ignoring education for 30 years.”
At CPAC, Stepman said “the Left” started the culture wars by “taking over the academy [universities], and because they took over the academy, they took over the K-12 schools.” She also claimed:
“You cannot live in a country where the public schools are actively anti-Americanizing children and expect that you’ll be able to keep your homeschooling and your private schools. So we have to care about what’s happening in the public schools… We can’t give up this fight… The whole point of public education in America was to create patriotic education.”
Later at CPAC, Donald Trump called for more private or charter schools if “government-run schools are going to teach children to hate their country.” IWF often echoes Trump.
Stepman also said the issue of education is important politically because public school children are going to learn “the narrative” and “they are going to grow up and they are going to vote.” She also asserted that we “are graduating rank after rank of woke cultural revolutionaries into every institution in this nation and it starts in the education system.”
In Stepman’s view, it is not enough to ban the teaching of CRT. (As of July 12, twenty-six states have introduced bills to ban CRT or limit teachers' teaching about racism).
Her remarks appeared to urge the policing of teachers, the dictating of curriculum to be more “patriotic,” threatening teachers with pay cuts, and the siphoning of public tax dollars away from public schools to private schools (which Milton Friedman and others dubbed “school choice”).
In contrast, IWF often laments the supposed “thought police” when racists and homophobes are challenged or held accountable. Yet, it appears that the idea of teaching accurate history has IWF staff reflexively calling for outright bans and legislative dictates on what kids are taught in class.
IWF’s allied arm, the Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), is also promoting a petition against CRT. (For more on the funding of groups attacking CRT, check out the analysis of Judd Legum.)
The hype over the asserted teaching of CRT is deeply embedded in overlapping right-wing networks. Matt Gertz recently found that nearly a dozen of the parents highlighted by Fox as critics of CRT “also have day jobs as Republican strategists, conservative think-tankers, or right-wing media personalities.” These anti-CRT professional talkers include IWF President Carrie Lukas and former IWF Executive Director, Nicole Neily, who also launched “Parents Defending Education.”
Koch-tied groups have long sought to limit public education, push privatization, and wield power over curriculum and teachers. The manufactured crisis over CRT is another tool in that arsenal.
The Shot
This month marks the tenth anniversary of ALECexposed.org, a project I launched in 2011 as an ongoing collaboration among advocates who have pushed corporations to dump ALEC over “stand your ground,” voter restrictions, climate change denial, and more.
The Chaser
Here is one of the videos about ALEC I helped create with the talented cartoonist Mark Fiore:
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The Attack on Honest History, the Roots of the Student Debt Crisis, and a Potent Pushback
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This week’s substack is stacked with new research about education, so let’s jump right in.
Charles Koch and the Roots of the Student Debt Crisis
Part 2, Milton Friedman, Charles Koch, and Attacks on Public Funding of Universities
By Caroline Jones and Lisa Graves for True North Research and the BOLD ReThink
The student debt crisis, as described in the first installment of True North Research’s student debt crisis report, is the result of public policy preferences pushed decades ago by free market fundamentalists like the economist Milton Friedman and Charles Koch, the son of an extremist. These men planted and nurtured seeds of selfishness that attacked the very idea of public funding of higher education (as well as public primary and secondary public schools, but that is a separate story).
In this second installment, Friedman and Koch peddle a reactionary agenda to undermine public support for public funding of university education. The partial implementation of that anti-government agenda has weighted down generations of American students with debt that its originators themselves never faced.
Koch has played a singular role in the length, depth, and breadth of his personal engagement in moving fringe ideas into the mainstream through his wealth—ideas that have proven to be exceptionally destructive to the health of our democracy, in our view.
Friedman Urged Student Debt and Whined about “Unfair” Competition with Private Colleges
The credit for providing the first major platform for the idea of student loan debt goes to Milton Friedman, who wrote about it in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom.
Who was Milton Friedman? The right-wing economist attacked the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education striking down racial segregation of school children from a proto-libertarian perspective in Capitalism and Freedom. The year after that ruling, which breathed life into the Constitution’s promise of “equal protection of the laws,” Friedman asserted the real problem was mandatory public education and urged the abolition of public schools. He made these attacks while “in many parts of the South, white citizens' councils organized to prevent compliance. Some of these groups relied on political action; others used intimidation and violence.”
In that 1955 article, Friedman argued that U.S. law should be subordinate to the “free market,” which would allow parents to choose “exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools.” That was the same year that Rosa Parks was arrested and charged for refusing to give up her seat and sit in the back of a racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Friedman claimed to personally oppose government forced segregation as well as government forced integration.
Friedman would later go on to win a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences that was created in 1969 by a Swedish bank. He helped indoctrinate generations as a leader of what became known as the “Chicago school of economics.” Friedman and his wife spent decades undermining public schools through pushing for privatization and vouchers for private schools.
“Capitalism and Freedom.” His 1962 book attacked public universities because of “their relative cheapness,” which he complained created “’unfair’ competition” with private universities. He objected to any subsidy for public universities but asserted that if there were a subsidy it should be provided to private colleges too. He also argued that public universities should charge more “fees covering educational costs and so compete on an equal level with nongovernmental supported schools.”
That is, Friedman’s concern was full of sympathy for private colleges while he staunchly opposed the idea of affordable state colleges. He was seemingly more concerned with the private sector’s interests than the lives of ordinary people seeking higher education.
How could students from lower and middle economic classes pay for these more expensive public universities if they or their families were unable to pay the tuition up front?
Friedman’s answer: debt.
His description of the human impact of this scheme is staggering in its amorality, in our view:
Friedman’s contention that public investment in education provided no cognizable value to a civil society is representative of his indifference to the adverse consequences to human beings of the political economy he helped build.
Namely, his dream was an America full of “free market” private schools at all levels rather than universal public education at any level. And he was later rewarded for such theories and ambitions, not just with a newly-invented Nobel Prize but as a hero of right-wing politicos who shared his fringe beliefs and agenda. Back in 1962, though, shortly after his book’s release, Friedman was lesser known.
Notably, in his book, he argued that the interest rate for student loans would have to be high, because some students might die before paying back their loans.
He also proposed a kind of indentured servitude via private contracts that would allow a shareholder to buy a “share” of a student’s future earnings for years to come. In some ways that has come to fruition through the securitization of student loan debt.
Friedman also asserted that government loans that were calibrated to secure a sufficient percentage of future earnings would protect against what he called “the perverse redistribution of income” of funding public universities through taxes. Put differently, the economist opposed the economic mobility made possible by public higher education.
Charles Koch Enters the Picture. Back in the 1960s, a scheme like Friedman’s was decidedly unwelcome and not vogue. But there were some few, like Charles Koch, who embraced such fever dreams of libertarianism and helped fertilize them with their wealth.
Koch was 29 when Friedman’s book was published. He did not invent the idea of students taking on debt to finance higher education, but he helped push it and other regressive policies about public education as a young radical cloaked in the respectability of a businessman wearing a suit and tie.
Koch Attends and then Funds the Freedom School, Hotbed of Anarcho-Capitalism
Charles, the second eldest son of a man who made his fortune building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, moved home to Wichita in 1961 to work for his father. Fred Koch was an anti-communist conspiracy theorist who helped found the reactionary John Birch Society (JBS). The JBS attacked President John F. Kennedy, the Supreme Court, and former President and WWII Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower as sympathetic to communism, even after the notorious “red scare” Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, was widely discredited.
After moving back to Wichita, Charles Koch joined JBS, which his father helped govern. He also began working closely with his father’s friend, Robert Love, a fellow industrialist and union-buster. Later, another leader of the John Birch Society, William Grede, would describe Charles as “completely under Bob Love’s influence and control.”
Love had previously led the National Association of Manufacturers and used his contacts with corporate CEOs to expand the reach of the John Birch Society, continue his and Fred Koch’s attacks on unions, and push other pet projects that claimed America was on the brink of communism in the 1960s.
It was Love who in 1963 suggested that Charles and his parents, Fred and Mary Koch, attend a training in Colorado Springs at the “Freedom School.” That was the name of the private educational entity operating on a ranch in the Rocky Mountains used by Robert LeFevre to invite white business leaders to share his theory that the government’s only legitimate role was to protect property. The Freedom School was described in a 1963 TIME article as a “reindoctrination course at the hands of a battery of right-thinking instructors.”
As detailed in Meet Charles Koch’s Brain, “historian Brian Doherty—who has spent most of his adult life on the Koch brothers' payroll—described LeFevre as ‘an anarchist figure who stole Charles Koch's heart.’" LeFevre described himself as an “autotarch,” which he defined to mean self-rule. He preached that all taxes were theft and exalted opposition to almost all government activities as infringing on personal liberty, except for the protection of private property. Under this extreme theory of the Freedom School, it would be immoral to impose taxes to fund public schools and universities.
As Jane Mayer noted in “The Secrets of Charles Koch’s Political Assent,” in Politico: “In 1965, the New York Times described the school as so implacably opposed to the U.S. government, it was proposing that the Constitution be scrapped in favor of one that limited the government’s authority to impose ‘compulsory taxation.’”
In that sense, the Freedom School sought to operationalize a version of Ayn Rand’s selfish theories by indoctrinating businessmen in “philosophy” of viewing democratic government as an enemy of liberty. The wives of the businessmen reportedly could not participate in the classes other than as observers and they were all white people. The New York Times reported that no people of color were allowed due to the segregationists in attendance at Freedom School sessions.
According to correspondence never before published, after Charles Koch’s training trip, Love wrote to LeFevre that Koch wanted to donate money to the Freedom School. Meanwhile, LeFevre corresponded with Koch’s father about the role of the Freedom School in “providing tools to defeat the socialists, communists, and other kinds of collectivists who would destroy our liberty and enslave us.”
Fred Koch, who published extreme claims that communists had infiltrated our government, found LeFevre’s anti-government views too strong. Those views, however, found a receptive audience in the son who would soon take over the family corporations. Charles Koch would later suggest that he thought it was the JBS that was too extreme; his mother even later asserted that Fred too thought the JBS was too extreme, but the family directed memorial donations in Fred Koch’s name to … the JBS.
Enamored by the Freedom School’s anti-government goals, Charles became a trustee of it even as his father became skeptical of its aims. By June 1964, Charles was helping to underwrite its indoctrination operations. Later Charles would say that he “was first exposed in depth” to the Austrian economists Fredrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises through the Freedom School. He also reportedly stocked the JBS bookstore with books by them.
By 1965, Koch was funding the expansion of the Freedom School known as “Rampart College,” with a larger faculty and student body. He even helped break ground on the new venture.
As Jane Mayer noted, LeFevre’s faculty “taught a revisionist version of American history in which the robber barons were heroes, the Gilded Age actually was the country’s golden age and the Civil War shouldn’t have been fought.” As she detailed in Dark Money: “The school had a revisionist position on the Civil War, too. It shouldn’t have been fought, instead, the South should have been allowed to secede. Slavery was a lesser evil than military conscription, the school argued, because human beings should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery if they wished.”
(This would not be Koch’s only foray into revisionist history. For example, there is the under-reported effort of the Koch-funded Reason magazine in 1976 to advance “revisionist historians,” like James J. Martin, as detailed by Mark Ames. Martin had previously been hired by the Freedom School/ Rampart College when Koch was a major donor and board member. Koch even wrote about Martin’s work at the Freedom School in some of his earliest known correspondence, which is excerpted below. Later, Martin became publicly notorious for pedding Holocaust denialism in his writings for the Institute for Historical Review, as noted by Doherty in his book Radicals for Capitalism.)
Notably, like Friedman, Koch has described his politics as “classical liberal,” a moniker that might come as a shock for modern-day Democrats who see almost nothing progressive about Koch and Friedman’s “liberalism.” More accurately, “classical liberal” is a cloak for the economic theories that became known as libertarianism. In 1964, the “classical liberal” Friedman was writing speeches for the GOP’s right-wing presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who lost in a landslide. JBS had tried to recruit Goldwater to run for president under its banner, but he declined.
Correspondence between Koch and LeFevre about the potential for a “true liberalism” in higher education is the earliest known writing by Koch detailing the early formation of his educational and political ideology. This report publishes that correspondence online for the first time. Additional examples of correspondence between Koch and the Freedom School can be found here and here.
Of further interest in these early Koch letters are the seeds of his now-famous strategy of infiltrating higher education to shape educational outcomes by tying funding and professorships to the school’s ability to produce free-market libertarian graduates for the Koch’s “talent pipeline.” UnKoch My Campus has documented this through open records requests to state universities, even as some public universities have tried a range of tactics to keep those details from the public’s eyes.
Specifically, Koch wrote to his fellow Freedom School trustees about whether they should invest in a single college to advance their libertarian theories or whether Rampart would be dismissed as a “propaganda house.” He questioned whether students who graduated would be able to obtain teaching appointments to advance their views at more widely recognized universities, which was his ultimate goal.
He was in his early 30s at the time, but on the verge of becoming the CEO of his father’s company and becoming one of the richest men in America. Steeped in the influence of LeFevre, Love, and the Freedom School, Koch was convinced of the need for a cadre of acolytes to support their liberatarian vision of how America (and the world) should be.
Charles Koch’s musings to LeFevre in this never before published letter are the foundations of what would become the vast vines of Koch influence over higher education in the United States.
This came in part through support for cutting government support for public universities and endorsing student debt as the preferred method for paying for higher education. It came later through his own donations to many public universities in exchange for control over certain academic centers or programs, starting in at least 1981.
It was through the Freedom School that Charles bonded with another young man named George Pearson and invited him to work with him at Koch Industries and in Charles Koch’s special projects. Soon Pearson joined the family business in Wichita that Charles later rebranded as Koch Industries, which is now one of the largest privately held corporations in the history of the world. Pearson acted as Koch’s lieutenant in advancing his ideological agenda through numerous organizations.
As the new Rampart College faltered in the late 1960s, Koch saw other opportunities to execute his own strategies in pursuit of the hegemony of libertarian theories in academia.
In 1968, he created his first known non-profit organization—the Center for Independent Education—through which he launched attacks on public universities and public schools, with Pearson as his point person.
In the next installment of this report, we will detail the higher ed agenda of the Center for Independent Education (CIE). CIE was run out of Koch Industries’ headquarters and in conjunction with a private school advanced by Bob Love. It was located near the Koch family estate and across the street from a racially segregated country club.
Tune in for more details next week. (ICYMI, read Part 1 and see our acknowledgements here.)
Spotlight on IWF: Read the Latest Claims on Critical Race Theory and Its Attacks on Public Schools and Public School Teachers
By Evan Vorpahl and Alyssa Bowen
At the national Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting, a policy analyst with the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), Inez Stepman, spoke on a panel described as “the Left’s effort to destroy America.” That panel focused heavily on critical race theory (CRT), a fairly niche strand of academic writing rooted in legal studies. Well-funded right-wing groups are trying to make a flashpoint of the 2022 election. It is this year’s trumped up “war on Christmas,” as described by columnist Leonard Pitts.
That CPAC panel began with a complaint by the moderator that religious prayers could not be taught in public schools but, purportedly, “racism” can.
IWF has a long history of attacking public schools, public school teachers, and unions. Stepman has been that pay-to-play group’s point person on education policy for about three years.
At CPAC, she began by stating that “where we are now, not to be negative, but is the direct result of the conservative movement and Republic Party ignoring education for 30 years.”
That is an astonishing claim because the right-wing has spent a lot of money and effort on education issues, for decades.
To take just one of many examples, Stepman previously worked for the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has pushed “model” bills to require the teaching of doubt about climate change to students, to divert funding from public schools to charter schools and expanded vouchers for private schools, to weaken teachers and unions, and more. ALEC has often boasted about how many of these bills have been enacted by ALEC-dominated state legislatures. At ALEC’s meetings at posh resorts, legislators vote as equals with lobbyists — including those from for-profit school companies — without the press or public present. (Stepman has also worked for other right-wing groups that have been funded by the Koch family fortune: the Heritage Foundation, Goldwater Institute, and the Pacific Legal Foundation.)
At CPAC, Stepman said “the Left” started the culture wars by “taking over the academy [universities], and because they took over the academy, they took over the K-12 schools.” She also claimed:
Later at CPAC, Donald Trump called for more private or charter schools if “government-run schools are going to teach children to hate their country.” IWF often echoes Trump.
Stepman also said the issue of education is important politically because public school children are going to learn “the narrative” and “they are going to grow up and they are going to vote.” She also asserted that we “are graduating rank after rank of woke cultural revolutionaries into every institution in this nation and it starts in the education system.”
In Stepman’s view, it is not enough to ban the teaching of CRT. (As of July 12, twenty-six states have introduced bills to ban CRT or limit teachers' teaching about racism).
Her remarks appeared to urge the policing of teachers, the dictating of curriculum to be more “patriotic,” threatening teachers with pay cuts, and the siphoning of public tax dollars away from public schools to private schools (which Milton Friedman and others dubbed “school choice”).
In contrast, IWF often laments the supposed “thought police” when racists and homophobes are challenged or held accountable. Yet, it appears that the idea of teaching accurate history has IWF staff reflexively calling for outright bans and legislative dictates on what kids are taught in class.
IWF’s allied arm, the Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), is also promoting a petition against CRT. (For more on the funding of groups attacking CRT, check out the analysis of Judd Legum.)
The hype over the asserted teaching of CRT is deeply embedded in overlapping right-wing networks. Matt Gertz recently found that nearly a dozen of the parents highlighted by Fox as critics of CRT “also have day jobs as Republican strategists, conservative think-tankers, or right-wing media personalities.” These anti-CRT professional talkers include IWF President Carrie Lukas and former IWF Executive Director, Nicole Neily, who also launched “Parents Defending Education.”
Koch-tied groups have long sought to limit public education, push privatization, and wield power over curriculum and teachers. The manufactured crisis over CRT is another tool in that arsenal.
The Shot
This month marks the tenth anniversary of ALECexposed.org, a project I launched in 2011 as an ongoing collaboration among advocates who have pushed corporations to dump ALEC over “stand your ground,” voter restrictions, climate change denial, and more.
The Chaser
Here is one of the videos about ALEC I helped create with the talented cartoonist Mark Fiore: