Opinion: Why Catholic U. Will Keep $1-Million Koch Donation

Two top officials at the Catholic University of America defend the school’s acceptance of a $1-million gift from the Charles Koch Foundation in a Wall Street Journal column.

The November 2013 donation to the university’s business school has drawn criticism from some Catholic academics and faith-affiliated progressive groups who contend that Mr. Koch’s financial support for conservative and libertarian causes goes against church teaching on economics and social justice.

University President John Garvey and Andrew Abela, dean of the business school, call such objections “a rather strong form of guilt by association” and say those who raise them “are suggesting a litmus test that neither we nor they would want to apply to other cases.”

They posit that if the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were to offer Catholic University a grant to pursue a malaria vaccine, the school should not reject it because the foundation supports contraception as a family-planning tool. “It would be an unhealthy precedent for a university to refuse support for valuable research because the money, somewhere back up the line, once belonged to a donor whose views on other subjects were unpopular within the academic community,” they write.