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University campuses have long been battlegrounds of ideas, but lately we have seen a sharpened weapon: the claim that ones rivals are suppressing the right tofree speech.

Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamolas Free Speech and Koch Money is an essential analysis of the amped-up culture wars over free speech. It offers a history of conservative philanthropic networks orbiting around the Koch family, who fund right-wing student groups as part of a larger effort to reverse collectivist inroads made by centrists and leftists.

By now, many aspects of the Kochtopus are well-known to observers of the dark money that underpins electoral, judicial and legislative campaigns. That is the nickname given to the American oil dynasty whose wealth is rooted in the fortune of Fred Koch, the founder of a refinery that became Koch Industries, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate later headed by two of Freds sons, Charles and David Koch.

The younger son David died in 2019. Charles Koch, at85, is still feisty as co-owner, CEO and chairman of Koch Industries, a role hes been in since 1967. He also finds time for exhaustive lobbying and philanthropic work, gifting gargantuan grants to conservative and libertarian causes and thinktanks that have proved successful in repealing environmental and worker protections and voting rights over recent decades.

Hence, Kochtopus a term capturing the fact that the familys lavish philanthropic work has spawned a billion-dollar arsenal fighting to suppress the rights and livelihoods of poorer people in America and across the world. For leftists today, the vampire-like nature of the capitalist famously identified by Marx, sucking the lifeblood of workers, has a face, and that face belongs to Charles Koch.

But the term Kochtopus has a longer heritage than many people today might realise, and is not the sole preserve of the left thats one of the valuable points of this nuanced study of ideological splits on the political right. Wilson and Kamola report that Murray Rothbard, for example, used the term during a breach with the Kochs in the late 1970s over the direction of the Cato Institute, which he had co-founded with Charles Koch. Rothbard took issue with the Donor, as he referred to Koch, micromanaging his work and acting like a sort of autocrat, which Rothbard thought undermined his own anarcho-libertarian vision of freedom from all coercive authority.

The end result isnt surprising. Rothbard was kicked out of the Cato Institute. He had challenged the power of richer men, and, as typically happens in the land of the free, the richer men prevailed.

Scholarly attention to this age-old problem the fact that paying the piper enables people with deep pockets to call the tune has been revitalised in recent years across the social sciences as BigMan philanthropy from donors such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros has become a hot political topic. But so far, alot of the academic focus has centred on the explicit goals of donors: Gates claimed intention to improve education in the US at the primary and secondary level, for example, and how the results have often fallen short of initial hopes.

This book, by contrast, looks at the surreptitious money flowing through university campuses, all of it geared to overturning what funders see as leftist biases in teaching and policymaking.

As Wilson and Kamola describe, such funders regard campuses as breeding grounds for future conservative thought leaders, politicians, right-wing pundits and DClobbyists. They spend big to achieve big deliverables when it comes to developing a pipeline of students committed to conservative causes, wording thats not Wilson and Kamolas, but taken directly from a funding proposal submitted by a faculty member at Western Carolina University to the Kochs. When academics at the university voted against establishing a Koch-funded Center for the Study of Free Enterprise, the university trustees overruled them and approvedit.

This isnt unusual in itself: the use of Koch money to seed libertarian research at universities is well documented by writers such as Jane Mayer and Kim Phillips-Fein. What Wilson and Kamola add is a timely focus on a new tool, the provocateur speaker who is invited to campus by well-funded conservative student groups, who then feign shock and outrage when the provocateur attracts a by-now familiar reaction: astorm of student protests. The speaker gets exactly what they wanted: the oxymoronic fame of being spectacularly cancelled.

Its an open secret that for celebrity scholar-pundits across the political spectrum Jordan Peterson, Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, Slavoj iek nopublicity is bad publicity. They want to be reviled, because its better press. If any group comes off looking bad as a result of the highly publicised campus free speech wars, its not the speaker who books a media tour on the back of it, its the students. They appear intolerant: either too fragile to listen to ideas they dont like or, paradoxically, all-powerful magically capable of eviscerating the lives of more powerful men and women with a simplewave of their placards. Neither perception is true, but the publicity surrounding speaker protests suggests otherwise, exaggerating both the sensitivity and the efficacy of campus protests today.

If this seems surprising if a reader is certain that Im wrong, and that all university students today are snowflakes who find their lectures too traumatic to endure and spend much of their time forming human barricades around any approaching guest speaker its because the Kochtopus has achieved its goals and is functioning exactly as intended. The aim is to manufacture and stoke campus culture wars, fuelling public support for a range of right-wing aims such as mandates against teaching critical race theory and severely punishing students who engage in protests on campus. Ironically, funders are often pro-free speech but anti-education, as if teaching is a special type of speech they cant abide.

That, at any rate, is what Wilson and Kamola argue that the free speech wars are financially lubricated by the Koch machine to fuel the impression of left-wing intolerance among students and faculty, thus rationalising donor influence on hiring boards to balance the bias on campuses.

Its a convincing thesis. As the authors put it compellingly, the culture wars are rooted in an anti-democratic power grab organized by a brilliantly conceptualized, deeply integrated and well-funded partisan operation. Following this conclusion, they add an appendix on When and How to Protest a Speaker with tips for, inessence, safer, better, louder speaker protests. Igroaned. The appendix is like counselling a school of fish about the exact size, shape and dangers of the fish hook and then saying: now leap up.

To lay my own cards on the table, Im no fan of noplatforming. Ithink it helps to cultivate solipsistic, insular protest movementsthat tend to alienate rather than enrol wider communities.

My own response to the craven provocateurs is simple perhaps too simple, but its better than throwing oneself again and again on the fish hook. Dont respond. Better to ignore the bastards when they come fishing across university campuses.

Remember the line that Howard Roark offers his enemy in Ayn Rands TheFountainhead (1943) when pressed about what he really thought ofhim? Roark replies with majestic indifference: But Idont think ofyou.

Thats how to beat Peterson or Murray or Coulter. By acting as if they dont matter, they cease tomatter. How will the right respond then? Byforcing and strapping students into seats? So much for free speech.

Linsey McGoey is professor of sociology at the University of Essex and the author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (2015).

Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus CultureBy Ralph Wilson and Isaac KamolaPluto Press, 256pp, 72.00 and 16.99ISBN 9780745343020 and 9780745343013Published 20 November 2021

Ralph Wilson, co-founder and research director of the Corporate Genome Project in Tallahassee, Florida, was born into an itinerant military family but grew up largely in rural Alabama. He studied physics and mathematics at Troy University in Alabama and then Florida State University, where he became involved in years of campus organising and activism against corporate influence. Icame to see how the highly influential donors that flooded our electoral process with money were also present oncampus.

The public needs tobe aware, argues Wilson, that the groups stoking the current crisis [about free speech] are the same groups that have advanced climate change denial and tobacco industry misinformation, and with the same tactics. People should also beware a marketplace of ideas model of the academy, which not only comes loaded with a free-market worldview, but misportrays the function and purpose of the academy while neglecting the presence of power and influenceIt is critical to protect the ability of campuses to regulate themselves and guide their own speech policies.

Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College in Connecticut, was born and raised in Washington state, where his father worked in the timber industry and he spent as much time as possible in the woods. He studied at Whitman College, in rural south-eastern Washington state, and, as a postgraduate student at the University of Minnesota, became active in organising strike support for the clerical workers union and on anunsuccessful graduate student union campaign, experiences that led to a strong sense of how hostile university presidents and trustees are towards their employees.

Asked for advice on handling potential free speech controversies, Kamola urges university administrators to trust your staff, faculty and students to make complicated decisions about what is, and isnt, acceptable on campus. Capitulating to outside groups and their political agendas might spare a few minutes of bad press, but at the expense of sowing distrust on campus and a loss of faith in your institution.

Matthew Reisz

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Free Speech and Koch Money, by Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola - Times Higher Education (THE)