UnKoch My Campus: Resisting the Political Corruption of Higher Education
Session Type(s): Panel
Starts: Saturday, Aug. 12 1:30 PM (Eastern)
Ends: Saturday, Aug. 12 2:45 PM (Eastern)
Koch funding is infiltrating our nation’s universities at an unprecedented rate. This is because, by Charles Koch’s own admission, universities are his most important resources for achieving political control. This panel will demonstrate how Koch funding at nearly 400 universities is helping him secretly buy influence over local, state and federal policymaking. We’ll highlight how Koch is stripping power from faculty, corrupting the education students receive and using their control of academia to attack our democracy. Participants will gain an understanding of how Koch’s strategy impacts their issue areas of interest and learn grassroots tactics for successfully disrupting this corruption of our universities.
Moderator
Panelists
Mark Hammond
Hey everyone! I’m a rising senior at George Mason University located in Fairfax, Va (30 min from DC), studying Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Next fall I will be attending law school. I’m passionate about creating a society that ACTUALLY values freedom, human rights, and in which people’s well being has a greater importance than accumulating wealth.
David Harer
I have been a professional firefighter for 14 years. I currently serve as the president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Alabama. Co founder of “Save our RSA Retirement”. It is the largest anti-pension reform group on social media.
Laura Wright
Laura Wright is Professor of English at Western Carolina University, where she specializes in postcolonial literatures and theory, ecocriticism, and animal studies. Her monographs include Writing Out of All the Camps: J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement (Routledge, 2006 and 2009) and Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (U of Georgia P, 2010). She is lead editor (with Jane Poyner and Elleke Boehmer) of Approaches to Teaching Coetzee’s Disgrace and Other Works (MLA, 2014). Her most recent monograph, The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror, was published by the U of Georgia P in 2015.