Republic of Science or Empire of Ideology?

The Washington Post has a long story by Jim Tankersley about Charles' Koch's attempt to influence the economics profession with massive donations of money to large numbers of universities. Here are some excerpts:

Koch’s donations have fueled the expansion of a branch of economic research that aligns closely with his personal beliefs of how markets work best: with strong personal freedom and limited government intervention. 

They have seeded research centers, professors and graduate students devoted to the study of free enterprise, who often provide the intellectual foundation for legislation seeking to reduce regulations and taxes... 

From 2012 through 2014 alone, his charitable arm, the Charles Koch Foundation, donated $64 million to university programs. A tax filing from 2013 lists more than 250 schools, departments or programs that received grants from the foundation, in amounts that ranged from a few thousand dollars to more than $10 million at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Recipients include obscure liberal arts colleges, flagship state universities and members of the Ivy League.

Some donations flow to research hubs within an institution, such as Mercatus at George Mason and the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland, which ground their research in the belief that economic freedom — and less government intervention — is the key to increased prosperity. Some support faculty positions at schools such as Clemson University and Florida State University, which have long specialized in that same sort of research...

Koch no longer personally reviews those applications — his foundation staff does...Koch, though, has articulated a set of principles to determine who gets his money. He has prized researchers whose values, as he calls them, are rooted in an economic philosophy that aligns with his— the belief that economic and personal freedoms produce the fastest advancements in human well-being.

The Post's article is titled "Inside Charles Koch’s $200 million quest for a 'Republic of Science'". This is a reference to a 1962 article by Michael Polanyi called "The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory". In that article - which Koch cites as a big influence on his efforts - Polanyi says that research dollars should flow to the scientists whose work is supported by the scientific consensus. Tankersley drily notes:

[Koch's donation effort] raises the question of whether Koch has become, for university researchers, the sort of distorting force that Polanyi warns against.

Why yes. 

Koch is making a sustained, multi-hundred-million dollar effort to push the academic economics profession toward a libertarian ideology. This is a "Republic of Science" to the same degree that North Korea is a "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".

One way to see this is as a defensive reaction against the interventionist turn in economic thinking. On many issues, academic economists are now less pro-free-market than the general public. And the most famous public-facing economists now tend to be left-leaning rather than right-leaning - Hayek and Friedman have given way to Piketty and Krugman. So the Koch donation campaign might be an attempt by libertarians to stem the tide.

Another way is to see it as a defensive reaction against the overall leftward turn of academia. Many social science disciplines - anthropology, urban studies, social psychology, and probably sociology - seem to have been captured by leftist ideology to a greater degree than econ was ever captured by libertarianism, even in the 70s and 80s. Koch might be using his hundreds of millions to try to preserve econ as a bulwark against this leftist capture of social science.

A final interpretation is that Koch is just doing what Koch always does - steadily pushing libertarian thought on the world by whatever means seem most expeditious.

Whatever it is, though, I don't like it. Unlike Koch, and unlike many of the lefty social science types I've been having debates with recently, I don't believe that social science is an inherently ideological enterprise. And I think it sets back our understanding of the world when people try to flood any portion of academia with researchers whom they think will promote a certain set of conclusions.

I don't have much more to say than that, so here's one of my favorite Feynman quotes:

Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming “This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!” we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.

A real "Republic of Science" would focus on an open-minded search for truth, not the enshrinement of one pre-decided dogma.


Updates

I also thought this passage from Tankersley's article was interesting:

None of the largest recipients of Koch dollars appear on a list of the most influential academic economic departments in the United States, as calculated by the research arm of the Federal ­Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Only one professor who works at one of Koch’s most-supported centers cracks a similar list that calculates the top 5 percent of influential economists in the research community 

Koch-funded researchers make a larger impact in the public arena. They frequently testify before Republican-led committees in Congress. Their work often guides lawmakers, particularly conservatives, at the state level in drafting legislation, and they have provided the foundations for judicial opinions that affect the economy on issues such as whether the government should intervene to stop large companies from merging.

It's possible that the Koch doesn't want to influence economic science itself, as much as he wants to sculpt its public-facing component. The end result could be two econ professions - a dispassionate, truth-seeking one occupying the upper levels of the ivory tower, at MIT and Princeton and Stanford, doing hard math things and careful honest data work that slowly trickles out through traditional media channels...and a second econ profession in the lower-ranked schools, doing a slightly fancier version of the kind of political advocacy now done by conservative think tanks. The former would have the best brains and the best understanding of the real world, but the latter would have much more policy influence and impact on the wider intellectual world. This is different from the wholesale yoking of science to ideology that I was envisioning, but it also doesn't seem like a pleasant vision of the future.

Many Koch money recipients have pushed back on Twitter, saying that unions and left-leaning think tanks also fund university research too. Of course, that does worry me too - maybe it's time for a general code of ethics for econ funding. But it worries me a lot more if A) the funding becomes the main source of funding for whole departments, B) it's hundreds of millions of dollars from one single source, C) it's explicitly ideological, and D) it seeks to make hiring decisions along ideological lines instead of simply funding research by existing profs.

There's lots of dirty stuff out there in econ, but the Koch effort just seems so huge and so unapologetically ideological that it's worth singling out. Quantity, as one of Koch's favorite authors once said, has a quality all its own.

A commenter talks about the situation at Western Carolina University. I've mainly been thinking about the science and policy-advocacy aspects of this issue, but education seems important as well.