‘Freedom Project’ at Wellesley College Under Fire for Promoting Wrong Kind of Diversity

‘Freedom Project’ at Wellesley College Under Fire for Promoting Wrong Kind of Diversity

Wellesley had the audacity to bring Libertarian thinkers to campus and the left is not happy about it.

Reason reports:

Wellesley College’s Freedom Project in Trouble for Promoting Wrong Kind of Diversity

Wellesley College’s Freedom Project, an initiative that promotes intellectual diversity by inviting interesting speakers to campus, could be in jeopardy. The administration plans to tinker with it following criticism from the left that the project is a plot to advance libertarianism, given the ideological bent of its financial backers.

“The speakers are very conservative and libertarian-leaning,” one student, Ivana Castro, told BuzzFeed. “They don’t bring in the far left.”

The Freedom Project is funded by billionaire philanthropists Charles and David Koch. In 2017, it received $1 million from the Charles Koch Foundation and another $1 million from donors in the Koch network. (Disclosure: David Koch sits on the board of the Reason Foundation, which publishes this magazine.)

Thomas Cushman, a sociology professor and director of the Freedom Project, is leaving the college for a year. The Boston Globe reports that it’s not clear who will run the program in his absence, whether it will continue in its current form, or whether it will receive the same amount of funding:

The shake-up occurred after the Globe outlined how Wellesley’s Freedom Project was pitched to conservative donors as a way to break through perceived liberal dogma on American campuses. It marks a significant shift for a program that the political network founded by Charles and David Koch held up two months ago as a marquee example of its campus-oriented efforts.

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