The proposal to establish the Freedom Center says the Center would be externally funded for five to ten years, “after which time a sunset review of the Center would determine its continuation” [bottom of page 1 at the above link]. By signing the proposal, the Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) and the UA provost each agreed “to provide all salary and ERE costs for two tenured or tenure-eligible positions in the Center upon the conclusion of its initial sunset review” [bottom of page 2]. [ERE is benefits and other employee-related expenses.]

The first sign that the UA Administration was dazzled by the private donations and blinded by short-term thinking is that they agreed to take over paying four Freedom Center professors. The gift agreements require that the professorships last 25 years, with the donors only paying for the first five years (not ten years). 

How much will these professors cost Arizona taxpayers for the remaining 20 years? The average initial grant to cover one professor’s salary and ERE for five years was $1 million ($200,000 per year). Assuming that no professor got a raise after year six, the University agreed to pay $200,000 per professor, times four professors, times 20 years, yielding a total of $16 million! Meanwhile, the Freedom Center’s goal is to undermine and privatize the University.

UA’s First Review of the Freedom Center Was a Whitewash - The next sign that UA was corrupted by the millions of Koch network dollars is that UA did not conduct a sunset review of the Freedom Center at the end of five years when they had to start paying the professors’ salaries. Kochs Off Campus! had to pressure the University to review the Freedom Center after eleven years! Even then, UA conducted a “periodic review,” not a sunset review as agreed upon. That was a violation of the February 2008 agreement. 

Furthermore, UA’s Spring 2019 review of the Freedom Center was neither “independent” nor “external.” (See UA rules about “External Peer Review” on page 2.) The composition of the External Evaluation Committee precluded the possibility of the review being impartial. At least 3 of the committee members had glaring conflicts of interest. The philosophy professor from the University of Michigan, Daniel Jacobson, founded and directs the Koch network's Freedom and Flourishing Project at U Michigan. The philosophy professor from the University of New Mexico, Barbara Hannan, earned her Ph.D. in UA’s Philosophy Department, so she was not truly an “external” reviewer. Another reviewer is said to be a friend of Freedom Center Director David Schmidtz on the faculty at UA, and the fourth was an administrator from ASU. A list of the review committee members can be found in this email. Kochs Off Campus! members (including UA faculty) submitted voluminous documentation of donor influence on hiring and curriculum, as well as other misbehavior by the Freedom Center, but the External Evaluation Committee ignored all of it.

Nonetheless, the report on the periodic review cited significant problems within the Freedom Center. The three most egregious are:

• A lack of transparency (see page 5 at the link above). No one knew why some students were selected for fellowships and jobs while others weren’t. Were those selected the most sympathetic to the Koch network’s goals?

• Top-down decision-making by the Freedom Center director (see page 7). The statement made at the Koch network's 2016 American Private Enterprise Education conference comes to mind: “The donor intent is vested in the director of the institute that is getting the funding” (see page 17).

• Little distinction between the Freedom Center, its director, the Philosophy Department, and the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science [PEMS] (see page 8).

The result of the periodic review shows how much Koch money has corrupted UA. After the report of the "external evaluation committee" came out, UA "elevated" the Freedom Center from a "college level" center to a "university level" center, instead of chastising the Freedom Center for its various acts of wrongdoing. "Elevation" meant the Freedom Center was removed from faculty supervision in PEMS and SBS and placed under Administrative supervision in the Office of Research, Innovation and Impact.

One reason given for elevating the Freedom Center was to “completely separate” PEMS from the Freedom Center. In practice, the “elevation” has meant PEMS no longer receives any of the Arizona State funding that goes directly to the Freedom Center, despite what was promised in the proposal to create PEMS. For a critique of the periodic review, see Tori Woodard’s 6/9/2020 blog post.

• List of External Evaluation Committee Members - Displaying its own lack of transparency, the UA Administration redacted the names of the four people who evaluated the Freedom Center. This email gives their names. 

• The Freedom Center’s Self-Study - As part of UA’s review of the Freedom Center, the Center had to write this self-study. Page 10 at this link says they plan to use their newly-acquired K-12 financial literacy program called Take Charge Today (with its database of 15,000 teachers around the country) to “further build” their high school course. Page 12 says they will launch a legislative fellows program to help UA students and faculty understand what the life of a legislator is like and how to govern a state. [Former State Legislative Representative Mark Finchem was the Freedom Center’s first legislative fellow.] Pages 28 and 29 show the Freedom Center’s outside funding and expenditures from 2009-2018.