THe Koch Network

The Koch network is made up of wealthy donors and the universities, think-tanks, advocacy organizations, legislators, and judges those donors fund to influence thousands of elections and public-policy decisions.

The agenda of this network is quite clear: to reduce taxation for the wealthy elite and privatize all public institutions and services. Campaigns waged by this network have caused extreme wealth inequality in the United States, stalled action on climate change, put millions of people in prison, eviscerated protections for workers, and gutted resources for our nation's public schools.

Koch's Strategy

In 1971, corporate attorney Lewis Powell sent a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Inside, he included a blueprint for corporate survival in the face of the civil rights, labor, and environmental movements of the 1960s. Powell, later a Supreme Court Justice, includes clear instructions for leveraging secondary and higher education to shift public opinion in favor of the free-market and big business.

Lewis Powell suggests organizing a well-respected "staff of scholars" and "staff of speakers" to write and speak about the benefits of the free-enterprise system while also evaluating textbooks to ensure fair coverage of the benefits of the free market.

Three years later, Charles Koch cited the Powell Memo in a speech he gave to business leaders. In it, Koch laments how universities “encourage extreme hostility to American business,” and that businesses must “[support] only those programs, departments or schools that ‘contribute in some way to our individual companies or to the general welfare of our free enterprise system.'”

Koch advises that “educational programs are superior to political action, and support of talented free-market scholars is preferable to mass advertising.” He admits that “the development of a well-financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us at the moment.”

Koch's Structure of Social Change outlines the Koch Foundation’s application of this vision using an “integrated strategy” for privately-funded policy change. First, donors fund universities to produce “intellectual raw materials.” Then the donors fund think tanks to convert those raw materials to a “usable form” as policy proposals and fund political front groups to provide the appearance of public support for those policy ideas. This strategy, paired with the Koch network's activity in helping sympathetic legislators get elected into office, creates the conditions for those legislators to pass laws that benefit big business over the interests of the common good.

The Value of Higher Education

A transcript of a panel discussion at Koch’s 2014 Donor Summit confirm the value of academia to this “integrated strategy." Koch Foundation staff brag about how their academic programs serve as a “talent pipeline” to facilitate students into “becom[ing] the major staffing” at Koch network think tanks and front groups across the country in order to bolster “state-­based capabilities and election capabilities" at the state and federal levels.

Recordings obtained by UnKoch at the 2016 conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education highlight Koch staff describing contractual control and the political goals of its academic programs. Some Koch-funded professors describe using large private donations to “take over” departments and using their courses “primarily as a recruiting ground” for Koch’s “liberty movement.”

The 300+ universities now being funded by the Charles Koch Foundation is the manifestation of Charles Koch's vision in 1974, where he stated:

"As I perceive the situation in which the pro-capitalist businessman finds himself today, there are basically four ways in which he can fight for free enterprise - through education, through the media, by legal challenges, and by political action... I do maintain, however, that the educational route is both the most vital and the most neglected."

Koch goes on to explain to his audience what he means by education, stating, "I mean basic scholarly research and writing which will provide us with better understanding of the market system and better arguments in favor of this system. We desperately need to develop additional talent capable of doing the research and writing that undergird the popularizing of capitalist ideas."

UnKoch's vision is to amplify any campus or community-based movement that seeks to disrupt the Koch network's goals. However, we feel that the importance of education to the Koch network's strategy presents a particularly unique and exciting opportunity for students, faculty, and teachers to protect the common good.