The exorbitant cost to attend an event focused on the “dignity of work,” along with the ideological leanings of many speakers, are emblematic of broader trends at Catholic University that prioritize the interests of conservative donors and favor a particular type of Catholic identity, according to interviews with current and former faculty. Several pointed to the hypocrisy of hosting a $2,000-a-person conference at a time when many professors feel disrespected by an administration they describe as ideologically driven and managerially incompetent. The Faculty Assembly reported an overwhelming vote of “no confidence” in President John Garvey and Provost Andrew Abela’s leadership in the spring. A group called “Save Catholic,” made up of current and past professors, along with students and alumni, cite steadily falling enrollment, deep budget cuts, pressure to take early retirements, and an unacceptable discrepancy between the salaries of top administrators and staff. While a conference about “workers’ rights” was being planned, employees note, teaching assistants, adjunct faculty, and other staff without tenure worked nearly a month into the school year without contracts until they were mailed in the last few days.

“You can tell when the board of trustees are meeting because all the fancy cars line up,” said Steve McKenna, a tenured professor who chairs the media studies department. “I haven’t had an office assistant in eight months, and we were told we were not allowed to have individual printers in our office because toner is expensive. Where is all the money going?” McKenna worries about a lack of transparency with the influx of funds from the Charles Koch Foundation and other conservative donors who have powered what he calls the “well-funded juggernauts” of the business school, and new centers such as the Institute for Human Ecology. At George Mason University, he notes, a public entity where the Kochs have poured vast sums of money into shaping ideological centers focused on law and the economy, students filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that have uncovered strings-attached funding, meddling in hiring decisions, and other ethically problematic practices. “We’re a private university and we can’t do that, so at Catholic we just have to take the word of the president and the provost that that’s not happening here,” McKenna said. “If you know how the Kochs operate that just doesn’t pass the smell test.” McKenna said the connection between the Koch-funded business school and ideologically aligned outside organizations has led to academic-hiring searches in which a favored candidate is put forward outside the normal vetting process. “It’s a way to make these ideological hires,” McKenna said.

Even before Koch money started flowing to the university, McKenna recalls being pressured by Garvey to hire a Catholic for a position in his department. “The president told me that he was cancelling our search for a faculty member in the area of media and religion because our final candidates were not Catholic. He said, ‘We can only have a Catholic.’ I said I wouldn’t have undertaken the search if that were a precondition—it wasn’t—and that I didn’t know how to hire only Catholics. He told me I'd just have to figure it out, saying ‘What I liken it to is the homosexuals—all the homosexuals know who the other homosexuals are. You just go to conferences and talks and all the Catholics find each other.’”

William Barbieri, a professor of theology and religious studies at the school, recognizes that universities like Catholic are obliged to seek potential resources from a variety of places. “But we need to think very carefully about a couple of problems accompanying the prospect of working together, especially with these kinds of groups,” Barbieri said. “The first is the possibility of ceding inordinate influence to donors who, of course, may have their own interests in pursuing this relationship. Despite our administration’s assurances to the contrary, I have never been fully convinced that our faculty appointments and curricular programs have been successfully insulated from the influence of these donors. Even if this influence is only indirect, it’s hard not to see it at work in the staffing and programming of recent additions to the university. At some point it becomes imprudent for any university to associate itself too strongly with highly politicized groups, and that goes double for the national Catholic university, which has a responsibility to provide a big tent while maintaining a certain institutional impartiality.”

A former Catholic University professor who left because he felt pressure to make hiring decisions described a climate of micromanagement and ideological intimidation. But he thinks the influence of big conservative money only gets at half the picture. “We have to be careful not just to put the blame on the Kochs,” the professor said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The fact is Catholic was in such a vulnerable situation and needed to raise money. It made the university susceptible to this kind of influence.”

It’s this influence that has a distorting effect well beyond the campus of Catholic University, according to Miguel Diaz, the John Courtney Murray University Chair in Public Service at Loyola University Chicago, and a former ambassador to the Vatican during the Obama administration. “Many progressive Catholics over the years gave up on the institutional church, and that left a vacuum for more conservative ideological influences,” said Diaz. “This means the donors now are primarily coming from one side of the ideological spectrum. And money is power.” Diaz noted that this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark 1968 Latin American bishops meeting in Medellin, Colombia, where the concept of the church having a “preferential option” for the poor took root. “We can only hope for the day when wealth does not determine power in the Church,” Diaz said. “As Pope Francis has reminded us, the ‘business’ of the Church is to exist preferentially from and for the sake of the poor.”