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Last year, alumnus Rex Sinquefield donated $50 million to Saint Louis University (SLU). The university accepted the funding despite conditions that gave Sinquefield influence in the selection of the director of a campus research center and final approval over all requests for research funding related to the “gift.”
Sinquefield is well known in Missouri for funding campaigns to cut taxes and privatize public goods, effectively dismantling our democracy. This is not unlike the efforts of major political donors Charles and David Koch, who also have an intricate history of buying influence over hiring decisions, curriculum, and research on the campuses they fund in order to mainstream ideas that support their political agenda.
Sinquefield was identified in the recent Sentencing Memorandum for former St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger, who has pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. The memorandum reports that Sinquefield was a major donor to Stenger’s re-election campaign and the leading financial backer of an initiative to consolidate the St. Louis region. Stenger stood to benefit from the initiative’s new government structure, and the memorandum reveals that he directed St. Louis County to hire the spouse of Sinquefield’s chief of staff to show his trust in Sinquefield. It’s difficult to believe that Sinquefield was not aware of Stenger’s criminal conduct, and SLU’s willingness to associate with Sinquefield calls into question its ethical standards.
To protect its ethical and academic integrity, SLU must:
remove Rex Sinquefield from its Board of Trustees;
not open the donor-influenced Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research in its business school; and
adopt a gift acceptance policy that provides faculty veto-power over terms and conditions in future donor agreements that threaten the independence of research and faculty governance on campus.
Donors influencing who is hired, what is taught, and what is studied on campus distorts decision-making, diminishes control of management and mission, and compromises the integrity and value of research.
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