I was saddened to learn this week that the Freedom Project at Wellesley College, an academic center founded with the mission of fostering discussions, debates, and scholarship on the concept of freedom, will be overhauled or possibly dismantled next year.
The saga began with a Boston Globe report last month on donations the group had received from the Koch Foundation. The story quoted Thomas Cushman, director of the center, saying he would not consider a speaker like Jane Mayer — a New Yorker journalist who’d written a book critical of Charles and David Koch — as part of the Freedom Project series. Mayer accused the Freedom Project of “banning” her from Wellesley, and presented Cushman’s comments as an example of Koch-funded operatives’ setting out to discredit the family’s critics.
An alumni backlash followed, and now the entire project is in jeopardy.
As associate director of the Freedom Project during the 2016–17 academic year, I worked with Cushman to come up with a roster of scholars to appear at our speaker series, our faculty workshops, and our winter seminar for student fellows. I have avoided making any major public statements on the controversy up until this point because I underestimated the extent to which rumors and misrepresentations about the Freedom Project would spill into the public sphere. Mayer and organizations like UnKoch My Campus are calling my integrity into question by spreading these rumors and misrepresentations. It is time to make clear what actually went on behind the scenes.
We did mull over the idea of inviting Mayer to give a lecture at one point, but I advised Cushman against it. The rationale had nothing to do with ideology. I had read some of Mayer’s work on the topic, and as a political sociologist I found it to be short on evidence and long on unwarranted conclusions. If you have ever presented research in an academic setting, you know these transgressions will get you roundly criticized by colleagues.
Please read the rest of this article on National Review.com, where it was originally published.
Joshua T. McCabe is the assistant dean of social sciences at Endicott College and the former associate director of the Freedom Project at Wellesley College