In April 2019, The Fenwick Review obtained access to a set of faculty-authored letters and petitions aimed at terminating the recently established financial agreement between the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) and Holy Cross’s Ciocca Center for Business, Ethics, and Society (CBES). The documents, which were distributed to some faculty members, include a letter to the provost requesting that the College terminate the agreement as soon as possible. Also included were four additional petitions asking the administration to reject the CKF funding, to suspend the activities of the CBES, to establish a Committee on Academic Programs-sanctioned review of the CBES, and to institute a faculty committee tasked with investigating the CBES. The Review is not at liberty to directly quote any of the circulated material. The letter to the provost has received 91 signatures from present and former faculty.
In an email sent to some faculty on April 19, the petition organizers wrote that by accepting funds from the CKF, the College of the Holy Cross has contradicted its mission and has potentially compromised the faculty’s own personal and professional ethics. The circulators of the petition suggest that the agenda of the CKF is antithetical to Catholic social teaching because it embraces capitalism, an economic system they believe unjustly favors the wealthy. The petitions are to be discussed and voted on at a May 7 faculty assembly.
The first petition, which calls on the administration to reject funding from the CKF, alleges (without any supporting evidence) that the Koch brothers, who fund the Foundation, advocate an unregulated free-market system that is incompatible with Catholic social teaching. (The Kochs certainly favor free markets, but hardly “unregulated” ones – e.g., the elimination of laws punishing fraud or restricting air and water pollution.) Additionally, the Kochs are accused of violating Catholic doctrine for supposedly denying the existence of climate change and for profiting from the production of fossil fuels. The petitioners cite Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ as the basis for the Kochs’ supposed incompatibility with Catholic teaching. Acceptance of CKF funding, per the circulators of the petition, would imply endorsement of the Kochs’ unacceptable business practices and environmental beliefs.
The second petition seeks to fully suspend the activities of the CBES until the College formally disbands the CKF-CBES agreement. The petition suggests that the CKF-CBES contract poses a threat to the College’s institutional autonomy and academic freedom. Use of funds from the CKF, the petitioners write, could set a dangerous precedent that might interfere with the College’s hiring and pedagogical practices, ultimately stifling academic freedom and surrendering to external political influences.
The third and fourth petitions motion to institute a review of the CBES, which would be authorized by the Committee on Academic Programs, and to constitute an ad hoc committee of faculty to oversee and investigate the academic and hiring practices of the CBES, respectively. The ad hoc committee would include six designated tenured faculty members – each of whom also signed the letter to the provost – and would give members the power to supervise the makeup of the Business, Ethics, and Society minor curriculum.
These petitions and arguments present some crucial issues. The petitioners’ attempt to ground their opposition to accepting funding from CKF in Catholic social teaching is puzzling, given that several Holy Cross academic and extracurricular programs, such as the annual production of “Vagina Monologues,” certainly violate Catholic doctrine, yet have never prompted protests from the faculty. If faculty members are so concerned that College programming conform to Church dogma, it seems strange, if not simply hypocritical, that they have nothing to say about the College’s complete silence on matters relating to abortion as well as the College’s refusal to abide by Church teaching on other socially progressive causes – which are infallibly enshrined in the Magisterium and further reinforced in the Church’s Catechism.
Unlike matters of faith touching on familial and sexual life that are fundamental to the historic teaching of the Church, papal judgments on questions of science (climate change, astronomy, etc.) and of political and economic systems do not necessarily reflect any unique insight that faithful Catholics are obliged to respect. When it comes to science, one need only recall the Church’s condemnation of Galileo to see how unwise it is for Church officials to offer final judgments of scientific truth. Indeed, the Magisterium of the Church freely admits that papal infallibility only extends to faith and morals—not science and politics. As the distinguished Catholic political theorist Daniel Mahoney points out in his recent book The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity, Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ contains a multitude of highly questionable factual judgments about both climate change and politics. Apparently reflecting his background in Peronist Argentina, the Pope even lamentably blames “capitalism” for generating “debris, desolation, and filth” while naively disregarding the far worse environmental (and human) record of communist regimes (recall the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, resulting from faulty reactor design, and note the vast air pollution churned out by today’s Chinese coal-burning factories). As Mahoney points out, Francis even praises subsistence farming as a way of life – one that the poor themselves are desperate to escape. While radically underestimating the contribution that free markets have made to promoting socioeconomic mobility (see Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Equality), the Pope has regrettably expressed admiration for the murderous Cuban tyrant Fidel Castro, apparently under the illusion that communism has improved the lot of the poor – there or anywhere else in the world.
Perhaps the most concerning component of this faculty movement is its attempted imposition of partisan political criteria on College donors and financial supporters. Should we, as a community, be applying political tests to respectable, philanthropic businessmen who are offering to fund nonpartisan College programs that align with the school’s mission? To those concerned about the possibility of unethical behavior by businessmen, what could be more meritorious than a program designed to address the relation between business and ethics? Furthermore, considering the dependence of this College’s growth and prosperity on donations from successful businessmen – the source of funding, for instance, for the Luth athletic complex, the reconstruction of the field house, and the forthcoming arts center – shouldn’t faculty feel a certain gratitude to the free-enterprise system, and the philanthropic endeavors it encourages, rather than adopting a posture of contempt towards that system, à la Bernie Sanders? And what about all the alumni donations that support faculty salaries and student scholarships?
As stated on its website, the CBES exists to prepare students “to become ethical leaders and critically engaged citizens of a society deeply shaped by business” and to offer “opportunities to explore questions about how business can contribute to the common good and promote real, long-term sustainable value for society.” The aim of the CKF’s grant-making is described on its website as being “to advance an understanding of what it takes to move toward a society of equal rights and mutual benefit, where people succeed by helping others improve their lives. We support a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives that foster respect for all people and protect human dignity, developing creative solutions that will help make the world better for all people. We reject racism, sexism, and any discrimination that impedes equal rights.” What is objectionable in such a mission statement? Further, the Kochs’ philanthropy has extended as well to such entirely nonpolitical, charitable causes as art museums, orchestras, and assisting the poor.
Above and beyond these facts, knowing the outlook of the Holy Cross administration and faculty as a whole, as well as the credentials of the faculty who will be leading the CBES, only a fantasist could imagine that this new center is going to become an apologist for “unregulated” free markets and climate-change “denial.” In fact, there is every reason to believe that the anti-Koch petitions arise not from any identifiable partisan dangers embodied by the CBES, but rather from pressure by a national, extremist political group, UnKoch My Campus, which has set out for partisan reasons of its own to remove any element of Koch presence from America’s colleges and universities – because of the group’s scorn for free enterprise and refusal to tolerate any dissent from its anti-fossil-fuel ideology. For the sake above all of preserving Holy Cross’s mission of pursuing truth on the basis of both reason and the authentic Catholic tradition, we earnestly hope that the faculty will vote down the petition to de-fund the CBES. And regardless of the outcome of the faculty vote, which may not even reflect the views of a majority of the faculty as a whole (only that of the attendees), we hope that the College administration will determine to maintain the CBES, which can only be of benefit to the Holy Cross community.