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The UA Freedom Center: Recruitment is the Name of the Game

As the reader of this blog may already know, KOC! members and supporters have finally pried loose the University of Arizona [UA] report on the “periodic review” of the Freedom Center [FC], a year or more after it was written. The document is in two parts: the first states the conclusions of the external review committee of four academics, the second consists of a “self-study report” submitted by FC Director David Schmidtz two weeks before the external review committee made its site visit on Feb. 13-14, 2019.

Two of the four reviewers were Daniel Jacobson, director of the Koch-ite “Freedom and Flourishing Project” at the Univ. of Michigan, and a Philosophy professor from the Univ. of New Mexico who got her Ph.D. at UA. The other two were the VP of Outreach Partnerships at ASU and a research professor with UA’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy. Internal evidence suggests that Jacobson wrote the text of the external review.

Both Jacobson and Schmidtz abound in praise of the FC, which they treat in complete isolation from the nationwide Koch project of implanting “freedom schools” on U.S. college and university campuses – around 350 so far, and counting. As director of one of these freedom schools, Jacobson of course knows perfectly well what the score is. Therefore, what might seem political naiveté on the part of the external review committee is actually disingenuousness.

This disingenuousness, suave and accomplished though it is, fails to prevent a great deal of the truth from coming through. And Schmidtz reveals much that our reiterated public records requests had not yet elicited. As a result, the skeptical reader emerges from the 40 pages of the document with a very different picture of the FC’s (i.e., Schmidtz’s) underlying motivations and actions than either Jacobson or Schmidtz wishes to create.

No doubt the colloquia, papers, talks, journals, and so forth that members of the FC sponsor, edit, deliver, or write are of acceptable or even better academic quality. But all that is window-dressing. In the context of the vast influence machine that Charles Koch and his wealthy right-wing allies have created and are continuing to perfect, the actual point is the deliverables, as Koch himself spells out in a 1974 speech that summarizes his grand political strategy [https://kochdocs.org/2019/06/07/charles-koch-anti-capitalism-big-business/]. On the one hand, the deliverables consist of papers that the think tanks of the State Policy Network can cite in support of their propaganda (the other papers don’t really signify) and use to influence government policy; on the other, they consist of the cadre that can be recruited to staff and sustain the influence machine.

The word “cadre” may suggest the Communist Party to the reader, but here is what Charles Koch himself said in his 1974 speech: “The development of a well financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us at the moment.” 46 years later, the Koch “cadre” number in the thousands. They are being added to on a continuous basis, and it is on the process of recruitment of cadre for the Koch pipeline that feeds the Koch machine, visible even through the veils of the UA report on the FC, that this blog will concentrate.

This recruitment process is inherently inefficient, in that most of those whom it targets will likely prove immune to it. Thanks to the spectacular wealth inequality of modern America, however, the Koch donor network has money to burn, and anyone involved in political organizing of whatever kind knows that a committed recruit is worth their weight in gold. Therefore, the gains in “cadre” justify the cost of acquiring them.

With the FC, the recruitment process begins with K-12 students. (Get ‘em young, you know.) To indoctrinate middle and high school students with “the free enterprise philosophy,” the FC offers its “Take Charge Today” financial literacy program, which Schmidtz recently acquired from the  UA College of Agriculture, and its dual-enrollment “Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship” (EEAE) high-school course, which KOC! succeeded in evicting from the Tucson Unified School District curriculum in 2018, but which (according to Schmidtz’s “self-study”) was still being taught by 13 high-school teachers as of 2/2019.

The original EEAE textbook--heavily biased, poorly constructed, ill-edited, with no peer review--has been given a face-lift, smuggled into a respectable-sounding series of scholarly books (where it sticks out like a sore thumb – shame on you, Rowman Littlefield of  London), and retitled Commercial Society when it was published in late 2019. According to Schmidtz’s self-report (and as KOC! members learned some years ago), the FC is also pushing their EEAE program with the Colegio Americano school system in Mexico. Both there and in this country, the course entices students to take it with the offer of relatively cheap dual-enrollment college credits. In addition (pg 13, “self-study”), we learn that Schmidtz would like to get “administrators and teachers in the EEAE program” to nominate “excellent high-school students” in that program as “high-school interns in residence” at UA.  He assures the review committee that the FC would “be governed by and responsive to any and all rules pertaining to conflict of interest.” Perhaps. In any case, this is another way to cultivate promising recruits and keep them moving along the Koch pipeline.

The EEAE program needs high-school teachers to implement it, which means that the FC gets to recruit them as well—50 of them so far, according to the “self-study.” Schmidtz informs us that the FC has provided these teachers “tuition assistance, per diem, or stipend…for taking UA graduate courses…[to] ramp up their qualifications to teach” the EEAE course. Naturally, these Master’s-level courses also enhance the resumés of the teachers and allow them to claim a higher salary. Given the maltreatment of teachers by the AZ State Legislature, one can hardly begrudge them that, but the inducement for them to participate in the EEAE program is obvious. Meanwhile, Schmidtz allows that the EEAE program, not being part of a campus degree, needs to move back toward the Community Campus office it “emerged from” years ago – or perhaps the shift of the FC from a college-level to a university-level center that followed the review will create “new options.” The FC’s goals (pg 11, “self-study”) include “grow[ing] the outreach mission of the EEAE program,” so, despite defeats in the TUSD and the Amphi School District, EEAE is not going away just yet.

As high school students who enrolled in the dual-enrollment EEAE course graduate and move on to college, they can use the credits from the course to count toward their total credits at UA, where the students can be fed into the Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law [PPEL] interdisciplinary major or the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science [PEMS], in which PPEL is housed. The FC created both of them, and Schmidtz funded PEMS for a couple of years with money from the subsidy that members of the right-wing Republican Liberty Caucus in the AZ State Legislature have insisted on providing the FC since FY 2014 (earlier than we at KOC! knew—see the table of funding sources, pg 28, “self-study”).

To make the PPEL major more attractive to undergraduates, the FC already planned to start offering paid internships to the PPE Society to them in 3/2019 ( the FC and the Univ. of North Carolina Chapel Hill teamed up to create this association--pg 8, “self-study”). And Schmidtz also envisions (pg 11, “self-study”) a “Legislative Fellows” program (about which more later) where the FC could try to persuade the legislative fellows to take on UA undergrads in PPEL or PEMS as student interns – a glamorous billet, and one that might lead to greater things in the realm of politics or in the think tanks and other areas of the Koch operation such as Americans for Prosperity. 

After majoring in PPEL or PEMS, the undergraduate –especially any who have snagged one of the desirable internships we just described—may want to stay on as a graduate student in Philosophy at UA. Of course, they will have to compete with applicants who got their B.A.s elsewhere, though they do have an “inside-track” advantage. If they or their competitors win admission and then do well in their first year of grad school, they can hope for an award of $4K to $10K/yr, and perhaps a job to boot (most likely helping to edit one of the two journals the FC controls--pg 6, “external evaluation”). The FC had made over 100 such awards by FY 2018, some of them to the same recipient for multiple years. 

Readers who are familiar with A Case Study in Academic Crime, Unkoch My Campus’s 2017 study of the shenanigans of the Kochs at Florida State University [FSU], will find the situation at UA unpleasantly familiar. At FSU, promising “right-thinking” grad students were given fellowships and reduced teaching duties, so long as they stayed on the ideological strait and narrow.[1] At UA (pp 5-6, “external evaluation”), the grad students whom the review committee interviewed said they did not know “by what criteria or process graduate student fellowships and jobs were awarded” or “under what formal process (if any) the lucky students were chosen…[or] the source of the funds that support them.” Apparently, Schmidtz distributes the largesse as he sees fit. One wonders if all the students who were interviewed were entirely forthright about how they came to be one of the “lucky” ones. In any case, this situation—arbitrary power exercised arbitrarily--would certainly encourage them to try to stay on Schmidtz’s good side, ideologically and otherwise. It is noteworthy that the chart on pg 29, “self-study,” shows a spectacular increase in FC expenditures on “grad students/fellowships/tuition waivers” starting at $76K in FY16 and then rising to $272K and $664K in FY17 and 18!. Such largesse is something to reckon with. 

Staying on Schmidtz’s good side would also likely be a sound strategy if, after finally attaining the Ph.D., one hopes to get a faculty position at a “good” school. Some of the winners appear in a list of “[grad] students who had FC fellowships” (pg 8, “self-study”), and some of the schools that employed or employ them are known centers of Koch influence. Such cases are living examples of the workings of the Koch pipeline, aka “gravy train.” Once one boards it, and remains ideologically orthodox out of conviction or expediency, it can take one far, and in comfort.

Schmidtz’s recruitment goals extend beyond students of philosophy, however, either embryonic or full-fledged. His plan for a “Legislative Fellows” program was already mentioned above. Pg 12, “self-study,” speaks of periodically getting a couple of legislators, one Republican, one Democratic, “typically state,” to spend time “in residence” at UA. This will supposedly allow UA students and faculty to learn “what it is like to achieve productive political compromise,” and there will also be “public events” where the Fellows can “discuss the prospects for effective nonpartisan governance” and work toward achieving this goal. One suspects that the underlying motivation for this pleasant arrangement is to increase the FC’s influence over the AZ State Legislature and perhaps nudge its members toward imposing libertarian non-partisan “reason” on the unruly democratic process.[2]

Like his benefactor Charles Koch, Schmidtz has big ideas. He would like to create a PPE empire on a global scale (Commercial Society has already been translated into Spanish, and translations into French, Italian and Romanian are in the works). He would like his “Arizona school” of political philosophy to rank with the “Chicago school” of economics and for himself to be one of the “memorable” individuals “who reinvent [their profession]” (pg 3, “self-study”). He would like the “UA micro-campus project in Peru” that PEMS is involved in to be only the first of many. He claims that he and his colleagues at the FC “write the materials [italics in original] that the next generation of teachers will teach” (pg 2, “self-study”). As of FY 2018, he had raised over $18M for the FC, half of which remained unspent, and more millions for the FC were or are in the AZ State budget for the following years. Someone with at least $9M in the bank commands respect in academe or elsewhere, and can do favors or withhold them at his own pleasure.

Schmidtz’s domination of the FC, which seems to be his private fief, may be why only two tenured faculty members have remained in the demesne. Not surprisingly, according to the external review committee (pg 6, “external evaluation”), these two (Pincione and Wall) “seemed content to let the director [Schmidtz]” run the show “while they pursued their research and teaching.” A wise policy to follow under an autocrat like Schmidtz (see the criticisms of Schmidtz’s “leadership” style, passim, pp 5ff, “external evaluation”).

The review committee wonders who will succeed Schmidtz and opines that the “succession” is the FC’s greatest challenge. So it appears. They suggest putting an “advisory or governing board” over the FC. A nice, conventional solution to autocracy, which of course an autocrat will never willingly accept. Indeed, the situation the committee describes at the FC illustrates the unhappy fact that libertarianism, while purporting to maximize freedom, in practice requires the imposition of stricter, even despotic social controls. Despite what the committee (more likely, Jacobson) claims about the importance of the FC “to the welfare of the Philosophy Department and the university at large (pg 7, “external evaluation”), it would be better for the Philosophy Department, UA, and human society if no successor to Schmidtz is found, and the FC ceased to exist. Unfortunately, this would still leave 349 or so other Koch-instigated academic centers for the world to deal with. In the meantime, one can at least try to pierce the veil of lies around the FC, expose its true purpose, and continue to oppose it root and branch.

----Patrick Diehl, KOC!


[1] Interestingly, Schmidtz’s CV, pg 20, “self-study,” mentions that he taught a first-year course on property at the FSU Law School. All in the family? Bowling Green State University is another institution that keeps popping up in connection with the FC and other Koch-ite centers.

[2] For a more direct expression of this agenda, see Against Democracy, by Schmidtz’s Ph.D. student Jason Brennan, who heads the list of FC fellows, pg 8, “self-study”—indeed, his fellowship is so early—2006!—that it precedes the actual formation of the FC and belongs to its precursor phase, the Freedom Program.