Mizzou Ignored Donor's Conservative Intent, Lawsuit Asserts

[Valin]

Real Clear Politics

Bill Zeiser

July 19 2019

The University of Missouri has faced a tough few years. First, there were well-publicized protests stemming from student allegations that the administration responded inadequately to racial bias on campus. At one particularly charged demonstration, a (since fired) journalism professor called for “muscle” to prevent a student journalist from taking video of the protesters. This was followed by declining enrollment, budgetary shortfalls, the temporary shuttering of dorms, and staff layoffs from which the school has only started to recover.

But Mizzou’s latest challenge comes in the form of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by Hillsdale College, a conservative institution in rural Michigan. In 2002, the university received a $5 million bequest from financier Sherlock Hibbs. A 1926 graduate of Mizzou, Hibbs intended for his grant to fund six professorships at the Trulaske College of Business to be filled by devotees of free market economics.

 

In order to ensure the money was spent as he intended, Hibbs included in his will a unique enforcement provision. Mizzou would be required to certify every four years to the satisfaction of Hillsdale College that each professorship had been filled by “a dedicated and articulate disciple of the Ludwig von Mises (Austrian) School of Economics.” The remaining funds would revert to Hillsdale in the event that this requirement was not met.

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Hillsdale’s suit is helmed by Jay Nixon, former Democratic governor of Missouri and a Mizzou grad himself. “I believe both from my time as governor and my time as [Missouri] attorney general that donor intent is important. It’s especially important when folks are as specific as Mr. Hibbs was,” Nixon told me. “Missouri University never embraced Mr. Hibbs’ intent, and consequently students aren’t getting the exposure to intellectual philosophies necessary for broad-based education.”

 

The smoking gun for Nixon’s claim comes in the form of internal Mizzou documents obtained during the discovery process. According to handwritten notes from a February 2003 meeting, Brady Deaton, then university provost (and future chancellor), expressed concerns that acceding to Hibbs’ request would consign the school to being “held hostage by a particular ideology.” Emails from Bruce Walker, then dean of Trulaske, suggest that administrators sought a way around Hibbs’ stipulation by simply recasting descriptions of existing faculty members. Walker emailed colleagues in March  2006, reporting that because “the Austrian School of Economics is quite controversial ... [w]e didn’t want to wade into that controversy, so we focused on some Austrian tenets that are compatible with what we do in our business school.” Walker noted that he had made five of the six appointments endowed by Hibbs “all internal for financial and faculty-retention reasons,” only conducting an outside search for one position. The lawsuit argues that no “disciple” of Austrian economics was ever hired.

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