Koch Brothers $$$$$ on our HBCU campus

In February 2018, without any fanfare or prior announcements, the TSU President, Provost and other bigheads held a press conference and invited selected members of the public and other King Lane favorites to come join them in celebrating a $2.7 million, 5-year Koch Brothers "grant" to TSU due to the "grant" proposal written by Dr. Howard Henderson and who is now the Director of the Center for Justice Research, the new "think tank" on our campus. But what exactly does the CJR do?
So far since February they seemed to have simply fattened the wallets of a few Administration of Justice faculty, naming them with the dubious and banal title of "Faculty Fellows", perhaps a more apt description of their role at CJR might be "Faculty Friends of Howard" enriching themselves through this so-called "grant" by being paid approximately $20,000-$30,000 a year in addition to their salaries.  At least 2 Fellows are both faculty and administrators in the AJ Department.  How are they able to balance 3 jobs and provide the best service to our students is truly miraculous!    
The CJR also seems to be pretty good at re-tweeting articles published from other organizations and recycling spurious research on their website. The Koch Brothers have donated and given massive amounts of money to approximately 500 colleges namely to influence the politics and policies of their investments in numerous areas of commerce and industry. We do not entirely concern ourselves with their interest in influencing public policy through the use of white papers, conference proceedings, "research" publications, etc.
Rather our more serious concern lies with the unequal distribution of the grant's finances to enrich only a select few AJ faculty when it was never opened up to anyone else and the insidious manner in which it appears Dr. Henderson seems to have been able to curry an enormous amount of favourtism and political power on our campus, quite possibly enough political clout to be able to co-pressure and co-remove 2 Interim Chairs to resign as well as remove the Interim Dean, Dr. Michael Adams (SOPA) who was denied the permanent dean position by the President in January 2018.
This type of vicious cudgel should make all of us and especially the taxpayers clearly and deeply concerned about the direction of TSU and especially the leadership's decision-making capacity. If Dr. Henderson was able to successfully remove 2 Interim Chairs and the Interim Dean of SOPA, perhaps his next step could be choosing the next President and/or Provost of TSU?

Comments

Anonymous said…
l. How did Lane agree to bring Koch money on campus??

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