Thursday, 01 September 2016
Truthout | Op-Ed
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/37447-the-koch-brothers-right-wing-trojan-horse-institutes-for-well-being
It is essential that all of us
-- current scholars and teachers, public leaders of thought and those
supporting learners at all levels -- examine the connections of well-being to
higher education: what that means, what it suggests and why it is important to
all involved. Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of editing a volume of 35
original essays by leaders of thought in higher education that does just that: Well-Being and Higher Education.
As a former college president
and current director of a higher education nonprofit, I have long been
interested in the issue of well-being on college campuses, so I was alarmed to
learn from Jane Mayer's New Yorker article "New
Koch" that the Koch brothers and their conservative network are
funding a long-term effort to promote the right-wing fundamentalist free-market
ideology by presenting it "as an apolitical and altruistic reform movement
to enhance the quality of life -- as a movement for well-being." And
I was dismayed to learn that the Koch brothers intend to implement that
strategy with a particular strain of "well-being institutes,"
spreading them to multiple universities.
Mayer quotes Allen Brooks of
the American Enterprise Institute as claiming that Republicans just needed
different packaging for their message: "In other words, if you want to be
seen as a moral, compassionate person, talk about fairness and helping the
vulnerable." Professor James Otteson, the executive director of the
BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism at Wake Forest University, which
runs the Koch-funded Eudaimonia Project, is quoted by Mayer in his enthusiasm
about the persuasive possibilities: "Who can be against well-being?"
This strategy, playing on the
proclivity of institutions of higher education to accept gifts, uses its
seemingly noble and apolitical movement in pursuit of well-being as the benign
cover -- the Trojan Horse -- hiding its underlying message that a "free
market" and reduction of government involvement will "forge a path to
happiness."
Just a few months later, Rob
Schofield's article in NC Policy Watch echoed this
sentiment, describing the Koch brothers' efforts to ideologically
"frame" well-being so as to advance the "hard right market
fundamentalist ideology by cloaking it in a warm and fuzzy language and to
thereby grace it with the veneer of academic legitimacy."
It appears that Schofield and
Mayer are right in describing the strategy and the intent. However, they
overlook an even more damning critique of this deceptive and manipulative
tactic. The ascription of the fundamental source and values of well-being to
the market ideology of the far right, and the lodging of its practice in the
academy by establishing "Well-being Institutes" ignores the history,
the community of practices, the research and the multiple available analyses of
the complexity of well-being.
Furthermore, the Kochs'
strategy misconstrues the very meaning of well-being -- failing
(perhaps purposely) to recognize the reductive narrowness and transient nature
of defining it solely through dimensions of "feelings," including
feelings of financial success. Their strategy ignores what constitutes the
manifestations of well-being expressed in experiencing higher learning. In so
doing, it also ignores what institutions of higher education can do to
facilitate those manifestations of well-being in students: connecting them to
higher education's core purposes of open inquiry, the practice of civic and
moral responsibility, and self-realization through the fulfillment of one's
human, individual and communal capacities.
The effort being made in
funding these institutes to ideologically frame (better, capture) the meaning
and implications of well-being is simplistic and shallow. This effort assumes
that if this framing is voiced frequently enough and offered without
examination, it will stick as the adopted framework. This is the logic of
propaganda. When a university agrees to open an institute that is established
to promote an ideology -- be it the ideology of unregulated free enterprise, or
one espousing state control -- it has abandoned the principles of academic
inquiry and critical thought that give it legitimacy, prejudging the very
questions it would claim to investigate.
It is worth noting the
discussion surrounding the significance of the recent nomination of John
Schnatter (founder of Papa John's Pizza and the namesake of Ball State's
well-being Institute) to the Board of Trustees of the University of Louisville
by the conservative governor of Kentucky, following Schnatter's and the Koch
brothers' combined $12 million donation to the University of Kentucky. Does
that discussion, and the many others that will likely occur in regards to other
campuses, get contextualized as part of a pattern? Isn't vigilance needed when
any gift appears? Shouldn't we ask how a gift to a university will influence
the integrity of the institution's core purposes?
Institutions of higher
education are, at their essential level, about the pursuit of knowledge,
evidence, truth, justice and well-being. Colleges and universities are unique
in upholding these qualities and must do so with integrity. Doing so should
reveal (contrary to what the Kochs and their network may assume) that complex
constructs, such as these, rest on neither market values, nor individual
self-interest. Rather, constructs such as justice and well-being are rooted in
relational experience and the values of open exploration and the common good.
That is just what the serious
examination of the rich trans-historical and cross-cultural meanings of
"well-being" suggests. True well-being is antithetical to the
propagandizing provided by the gift of these Trojan Horse institutes. We must
contextualize the Kochs' effort to capture "well-being" and
distinguish it from altruistic efforts to further the real purposes of higher
education.
Copyright, Truthout. May not
be reprinted without permission.
Donald W. Harward is president
emeritus of Bates College and has directed the Bringing Theory to Practice Project since
its founding in 2003 with S. Engelhard Pingree.
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