Fighting Back: The Harassment of WCU (and ASU) Faculty

The Koch Bros. get their hooks
into Western Carolina University

We know about local Republican operatives slapping university types they don't like with demands for their emails. Republican Party Chair Anne Marie Yates and her chief legal advisor Nathan Miller went after the current Democratic Board of Elections member because she had the gall to sue over the unconstitutional behavior of the Republicans in suppressing the vote of ASU students. Not only did she sue, she won in court. So Nathan Miller demanded all her emails from ASU and made clear to a judge that it was purely a political witch-hunt. That judge listened and dismissed Miller's claim.

It's a pattern of harassment being duplicated at other state universities.

Last November, we wrote here about the scheme by the Koch Bros. to bring indoctrination in predatory capitalism to the curriculum at Western Carolina University and give it an academic coating. The faculty -- some of them, at least -- pushed back against making their institution the handmaiden to conservative propaganda. And the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a flying wedge of the Art Pope Empire for Stamping Out Progressive Thought, promptly filed public records requests for all the emails of those faculty members.

Chilling effect? You bet! Harassment that produces silent acquiescence in the face of ruthless power? You can take that to the bank (and please make sure it's a predatory institution)!

One of those harassed faculty members resisted, apparently without much support from the higher-ups at her university who wanted to get their mitts on that Koch money. Now that faculty member has scooped the snoopers at the Art Pope Empire by publishing all her emails herself on her own blog. Ha!

What terrible misdeeds do those emails reveal? Mainly, that the faculty member was sharing news articles about the Koch takeover of higher education. Off with her head!

Take a look at the faculty member's blog post. Good stuff.