As students and faculty arrive back on campus for the new school year, new evidence has emerged in the Eudaimonia Institute saga that swept the national news circuit last semester.
With partisan intentions, a group of faculty senators conducted what can be seen as a political hit job on the Eudaimonia Institute and its Executive Director Dr. James Otteson. In doing so the senators themselves are guilty of producing libelous evite for their motion.
The Eudaimonia Institute is a new institute on Wake Forest University’s campus whose mission “is to explore the edence directed toward Dr. James Otteson, in an attempt to persuade members of the Faculty Senate to volements of and institutions that support eudaimonia, or genuine human flourishing.”
In order to provide funding for the institute, the university approved a $3.69 million grant from the Koch Foundation over the next five years. This past March, the Faculty Senate voted on a resolution that looked to strip EI from their funding. This vote resulted in a 17-9 ruling in favor of the motion.
The committee, whose goal was to investigate the Eudaimonia Institute, made up of almost all registered Democrats, was led by chairman Dr. Jay Ford, as well as faculty members Doug Beets, Simone Caron, Claudia Kairoff, and Kathy Smith. Together these professors total 140 years of experience at Wake Forest.
In its report, the Faculty Senate uses a transcript from the 2014 Charles Koch Foundation biannual summit as the main piece of evidence to showcase why the Foundation is working to “co-opt higher education.” While the faculty senators believe this report to hold the key to their arguments, it appears that using this report has actually brought the group face-to-face with possible libel by producing a fabricated and manipulated quote, in which they charge Dr. Otteson with saying at the summit.
In the “Koch Well-Being Initiative” section of the Faculty Senate report, the senators present evidence by Jane Mayer, an investigative reporter for The New Yorker since 1995, as well as quotes from the transcript of the June 2014 biannual Koch Summit meeting.
In the senate report, the committee members charge Otteson with asking the crowd:
“Who can be against well-being? The framing is absolutely critical.”
The committee prefaces this quotation by stating that the answer Otteson gives proves he is trying to find ways to frame the mission of the Koch Foundation in ways that will mislead the general public. However, in the transcript that the group cites, the quote is completely different. The full quote reads: “What we do is enable people from across the political spectrum a chance to see how they, too, might (inaudible) might actually want to be part of (inaudible). The framing of that is going to be critical.”
The quote that the committee claims Otteson says is almost entirely factually inaccurate. This begins with the inaccuracies of the framing, leading to what could even be considered libel meant to damage the reputation of Dr. Otteson, the Charles Koch Foundation and the Eudaimonia Institute as a whole.
These actions by a faculty member are extremely concerning, especially in a place of higher education where professors are trusted to encourage and enforce academic integrity to their students. On the contrary, when it comes to published work on behalf of the Faculty Senate, they clearly cannot uphold their own responsibility to show academic integrity.
This quote was taken completely out of context, and re-purposed in a libelous manner to enhance their argument against a fellow faculty member. What sort of message are these faculty members sending to their students by leading this underhanded attack on another faculty member? Are they condoning academic carelessness? Aside from the fact that their report is based solely on speculation and conspiracies, the use of a libelous quote in one of the biggest sections of their report raises many more questions.
“What we do is enable people from across the political spectrum a chance to see how they, too, might (inaudible) might actually want to be part of (inaudible). The framing of that is going to be critical.”
In an article published by committee chairman Dr. Jay Ford and professor Doug Beets, the two again use the summit transcript as an integral part of their core argument, while also mentioning that much of their sources came from The New Yorker investigative reporter Jane Mayer. However, Jane Mayer has had problems of her own including an investigation into some of her work.
In the book “Dark Money”, which the Senate Committee specifically cites, Mayer comes across as an ideologue with an ax to grind. She accuses only the Republicans of partaking in the “dark money” side of politics. According to Scott Walter, the president of the Capital Research Center, Mayer is trying to partake in a “radical reorientation of American thinking.”
Walter goes on to explain how Mayer fails to acknowledge the role of liberal groups in the same activities, who oftentimes are partaking in a much worse extent. One example, George Soros, has bankrolled politicians from local District Attorney positions to Presidential Candidates.
Specifically, Mayer uses the 2010 North Carolina election in her book as an example of Republicans “buying” an election. Walter explains that Mayer focuses all her energy on $2 million in “outside money” that she believed was connected to the Koch brothers.
In doing so, she fails to draw light on two important details. First of all, she ignores the fact that the total giving in North Carolina that year was around $30 million. Secondly, Mayer fails to acknowledge that the Democrats actually outspent the Republicans by $2 million in their losing campaign effort. Could the loss of the Democratic party be the fuel to Mayer’s attempt at a fire?
The University administration has done the right thing. While they have upheld their responsibility and not taken steps to limit academic freedom, these professors clearly have, and should be held responsible.
Everyone should always use facts and complete context in presenting something, and in this case, the committee did not. It’s disturbing that our educators are misleading their colleagues into making a decision on incomplete information and that they are publishing these fallacies about a fellow faculty member.
The Faculty Senate has provided baseless claims and taken part in their own form of what many of them have accused Trump of doing: bringing about unnecessary/unsupported fear. With no copy of the donor agreement and much of the evidence in agreements from other schools showing nothing concerning, what are these professor’s claims based upon? Are these faculty members partaking in a form of “Trumpism” themselves?
