To: John Thrasher, President, Gary Tyson, President, Faculty Senate, and Stefano Cavallaro, President, Student Body President
UnKoch Florida State University and Protect Academic Freedom
We, the undersigned, recognize that right now the Charles Koch Foundation has corrupt influence over Florida State University's Dept. of Economics through contracts that give Koch power over faculty hire, graduate assistant hire, and curriculum control. We believe that the newly appointed Koch funded President at FSU, John Thrasher, should sign and agree to the nine student demands concerned with promoting honesty, integrity, academic freedom and transparency at FSU.
In general, the demands call on John Thrasher to:
1) Publicly admit he lied about his own Koch funding and commit to a good faith gesture return of all the Koch money he received.
2) Recognize the corrupt nature of the 2008 and 2013 CKF contracts with FSU and publicly condemn Koch for their corrupt influence at FSU.
3) Work to repair the damage done by the Koch contracts by creating policies and subcommittees concerned with private donor -public university foundation transparency.
4) Work to undo the current corrupt contracts at FSU as well as create and promote ethics policies and committees with a supermajority of students and faculty to protect FSU's own policies on academic freedom and prevent further corrupt contracts that violate academic freedom through undue outside influence.
(Demands can be found in full at: http://bit.ly/1pwlk0g)
In general, the demands call on John Thrasher to:
1) Publicly admit he lied about his own Koch funding and commit to a good faith gesture return of all the Koch money he received.
2) Recognize the corrupt nature of the 2008 and 2013 CKF contracts with FSU and publicly condemn Koch for their corrupt influence at FSU.
3) Work to repair the damage done by the Koch contracts by creating policies and subcommittees concerned with private donor -public university foundation transparency.
4) Work to undo the current corrupt contracts at FSU as well as create and promote ethics policies and committees with a supermajority of students and faculty to protect FSU's own policies on academic freedom and prevent further corrupt contracts that violate academic freedom through undue outside influence.
(Demands can be found in full at: http://bit.ly/1pwlk0g)
Why is this important?
Right now FSU has corrupt influence from Koch coming in the form of 1) the 2008 and 2013 contracts which the American Association of University Professors deems a violation of academic freedom 2) a Board of Trustees chaired by the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Koch funded James Madison Institute 3) a seven time Koch funded President who lied about his Koch funding and supported a non-transparency bill that closed off public access to private donor-public university contract agreement meetings.
Help us stop the capture of our university by Koch. The student demands and can be found at: http://bit.ly/1pwlk0g
Help us stop the capture of our university by Koch. The student demands and can be found at: http://bit.ly/1pwlk0g