What Western Carolina University Will Do For Money

WCU in Cullowhee is moving toward an agreement to indoctrinate teenagers and post-teens in the predatory capitalism of fossil fuel dinosaurs -- namely, Koch Bros. industries. Western Carolina University administrators are angling for a grant to establish a Koch-funded "Center for Study of Free Enterprise" on the Cullowhee campus (thanks to NC Policy Watch for the heads-up):

Under a proposal currently under consideration by WCU administrators, the Charles Koch Foundation would give $2 million to the university .... The faculty member driving the process appears to be Economics Department Professor Edward Lopez, who also boasts the title of “BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism.” Lopez, who gave the “Friedman Legacy Lecture” this summer at the John Locke Foundation, is a graduate of the Kochs’ largest university grantee, George Mason University, and an energetic proponent of “free market” economic theories.

There's an interesting history behind that imposing title, "BB&T Distinguished Professor."

Edward Lopez

The trail goes back to 2008, when BB&T honcho John Allison was pushing Ayn Rand's "objectivist" worship of capitalism on any North Carolina college that would take his money. (He had tried to set up a study center at Appalachian State University, but ASU faculty members objected to "objectivism" and the requirement that freshmen would be forced to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, among other types of indoctrination.) Allison turned his charm on WCU and got further.

Allison's BB&T Foundation inked a deal in 2008 with WCU's College of Business to set up the endowed chair that Professor Edward Lopez now occupies. The signed agreement stipulated that "the Professor shall work closely with the Ayn Rand Institute and have a reasonable understanding and positive attitude toward Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism."

"Positive attitude"? That's not exactly scholarship, and it's not a disinterested search for knowledge. That's indoctrination. The WCU agreement also mandated the required reading of Atlas Shrugged, but that was later dropped when WCU faculty began finding out about this deal with the devil.

Now it appears that the Ayn Rand Professor Edward Lopez is making his own deal with other devils, the Koch Bros., for $2 million in cash -- "what many rightfully view as blood money from a corporate behemoth that is gleefully plundering and endangering the planet and buying lackey politicians and mouthpieces at a prodigious rate."

The WCU Faculty Senate is fighting this, but with the current funding cuts enacted by The Honorables in Raleigh, WCU administrators are going to be glitter-eyed at the temptation to make that deal with the devil.

Allison Takes Over the Cato Institute for the Koches

John Allison

John Allison, the CEO of BB&T in Winston-Salem, served as a member of Appalachian State University's Board of Trustees for two four-year terms, from 1997 to 2005. He was -- and still is, believe us! -- a strict devotee of Ayn Rand's "objectivist" philosophy that greed is good, the weak are expendable, and everything has a price.

During his tenure on the ASU Board of Trustees, he dangled several hundred thousand dollars in front of the chancellor in an attempt to buy a chunk of the curriculum, which is to say, Allison would see that ASU got the money if ASU guaranteed that its students would be forced to read and study Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." That plan came to grief when the faculty got wind that their intellectual freedoms were up for sale.

Allison subsequently subverted scholarly freedom at a number of colleges, including Guildford College and Western Carolina University in North Carolina, proving indeed that everything does have a price, at least some of the time.

To find him now allied with the Koch bros. and taking over the Cato Institute is not altogether surprising.