When people are selected on the basis of their melanin and genitalia you get regression toward the mean in other characteristics.

Tim Geithner is now looting the retirement funds of Federal employees, ‘borrowing’ them to fuel the voracious Federal spending machine. To be ‘repaid’ by the Bernank’s home-printed funny money.
Here’s an alternative: Loot the endowments of all the big leftist Foundations. Ford, Tides, Joyce etc etc. All that money just sitting there, it should be put to the use of The People, instead of a bunch of liberal trust fund babies. The Feds under Obama have the muscle to pull it off – didn’t they just grab Chrysler and GM?
And while they’re at it, ‘borrow’ the retirement funds of all the NGOs – which are just propped up by the taxpayers, the same as Federal employees.

Given how leftists manage to pervert foundations founded by conservatives, into leftist organizations, with the Ford foundation being a prime example, I can understand why they would want a hiring veto power to prevent the university from using their money to promote leftist goals.
And they are not telling the university who they must hire. They merely retain a veto for unacceptable candidates, so nobody is hired unless both the university, and the Koch’s both agree.

Mark Bauerlein is correct that the Koch Foundation had no power to tell FSU who to hire. The advisory committee consisted of two economists (chaired professors) on the FSU faculty and one economist representing the Koch Foundation. The decision rule for the committee was unanimity. The faculty had three levels of control: 1) they put forward the screened initial list from the list of all applicants, 2) either of the two economics faculty on the advisory committee could himself block a nominee unacceptable to the faculty, and 3) the final go/no-go decision on the offer had to be approved by the department’s executive committee. What Mark doesn’t mention is that while The Koch Foundation supplied the salary, the faculty were appointed on regular lines backed-stopped by hard money. That means that the Koch foundation has no control over the research or teaching of the faculty once hired.

I do not understand Allan’s first comment. The second comment, though, is wrong. First of all, if you can find a single conservative that was hired through Ford’s diversity initiatives, that would be a big surprise. And if you wish to compare the number of people hired through those programs (hundreds of them) with the one person as FSU, the alarm doesn’t quite hold up. Let’s remember that “diversity” in hiring does indeed mean that the program has a veto power. Check out Ford’s guidelines for grants.
Second, Koch does not “tell” FSU whom to hire. All it does is retain the power to veto people proposed as the candidate (the salary comes entirely out of Koch funding).

“Diversity” is code for “liberalism.” It ought not be, but in practical terms it is. If campuses practiced true diversity, we would have many more conservative thinkers as part of the on-campus dialog. Unfortunately, liberals like to say they are open minded, but in practice they are not as reflected in any survey of political bias of on-campus personnel and as demonstrated in the comfort level of conservatives to argue their points of view in campus discussion.

This is NOT a debate on whether offering money to schools to promote diversity is a good thing.
This debate is about whether offering money to schools to promote diversity is different from offering money to a school to teach something AND telling the school who to hire.
In the first, it is conceivable that a conservative could be hired. In the second, it is not conceivable that a liberal (at least one Koch objects to) could be hired.
Again, if Koch had decided to fund a chair for, say, the advancement of the Austrian School of Economics and left it at that, there would be no controversy.

Perhaps Koch should donate targeted at fostering greater ideological diversity in higher education. Surely no right thinking academic would oppose increasing diversity even with Koch money.

BS.
If Koch had given the money but not retained a role in naming the professors, there would be controversy. Indeed, if Koch had given money, but not liked what FSU was doing with the money, it could have asked for it back or refused to give more. In any case, there is little, if any, similarity.