Iowa State University’s economics department will receive $1,685,000 over five years from the Charles Koch Foundation for its program studying underperforming Midwest markets and entrepreneurship opportunities, the university has announced. ISU had been seeking up to $3.7 million for the program from the foundation of the libertarian-minded GOP billionaire and another source. According to ISU, the foundation’s pledge, received through the ISU Foundation’s Forever True, For Iowa State campaign, may eventually total $2.5 million. (Read the full text of the university’s agreement with the Koch Foundation at the end of this post.)
The funding proposal was penned by economics professor and Ames City Council member Peter Orazem, who was a Koch visiting professor of business economics at the University of Kansas in 2004 and 2005. (Read his proposal here.) Orazem heads the program, which is based in the college of agriculture and part of ISU’s Agricultural Entrepreneurship Initiative established in 2005 with a $1.6 million gift from Roger Underwood, founder of the Ames-based seed company Becker Underwood, and his wife Connie. Former Board of Regents president and GOP agribusiness tycoon Bruce Rastetter, who along with Underwood is a partner at the Rural American Fund, later gave $2.25 million to the program to establish the Rastetter Endowed Chair in Agricultural Entrepreneurship, which is based in the economics department and occupied by Kevin Kimle, a colleague of Orazem’s who is also involved in the Midwest markets program.
The entrepreneurial initiative was touted by Wendy Wintersteen, the dean of ISU’s ag college and a finalist to be the university’s next president, at an open forum last week where she called it “another great example of investment in our students.” The Koch Foundation deal was apparently referenced earlier this week in a letter published in the Iowa State Daily from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Art Cullen, who warned against Wintersteen becoming ISU’s next president. “The Koch Brothers and Monsanto and Dow DuPont own Iowa State, the governor’s office and the Board of Regents,” he wrote. “They will do anything to make certain that they can do business in whatever way they like, no matter the cost.”
Orazem previously told the Informer that his proposal was written with concerns about academic freedom in mind and that he didn’t believe the foundation’s money would unduly influence the market research program’s work.
