I have requested a thorough review of all active donor agreements supporting faculty positions throughout the university to ensure that they do not grant donors undue influence in academic matters,” George Mason President Ángel Cabrera wrote Monday night in an email to the university’s faculty and staff. “But we’re in the process now of talking with faculty about how this is going to look and what this is going to be.” 
 
 [George Mason president: Some donations ‘fall short’ of academic standards] 
 
 Monday’s email from Cabrera followed a note sent days earlier, in which the university president said some financial gift agreements that had been accepted by George Mason “fall short of the standards of academic independence” and raised questions about donor influence. Cabrera on Friday did not indicate which gift agreements were troubling, but a George Mason spokesman confirmed that the email was related to funding from the Charles Koch Foundation, among other donors. Cabrera emphasized in his note to faculty that the "agreements did not give donors control over academic decisions" — an apparent reference to the fact that the Koch Foundation did not control a majority of seats on the selection committees. “Yet these agreements fall short of the standards of academic independence I expect any gift to meet.” 
 
 Those gifts agreements, accepted by George Mason between 2003 and 2011, supported faculty positions in economics and “granted donors some participation in faculty selection and evaluation,” he said. “Except for the most recent one, these agreements have expired,” he said. "The idea that the Kochs are giving money without anything expected in return always seemed a little absurd," he said. Our Giving Principles 
 
 An open letter to our current and future university partners from the Charles Koch Foundation: 
 
 A recent report raised questions about how the Charles Koch Foundation structures our grants to universities. In a letter published online, John Hardin, the foundation’s director of university relations, wrote that the agreements have “evolved over time.” 
 
 “These old grant agreements at George Mason University did not allow us to cause the university to hire certain professors, nor did they allow us to make decisions regarding the curricula or research that professors pursued,” Hardin said in the letter.
– The Charles Koch Foundation donated millions to George Mason University, and newly released documents reveal that in exchange, the conservative foundation was granted some influence over the hiring and firing of professors. After the revelation, the president of the university ordered an inquiry into the school's gift acceptance policy, the New York Times reports. "Given the discovery of problematic gift agreements ... I have requested a thorough review of all active donor agreements supporting faculty positions throughout the university to ensure that they do not grant donors undue influence in academic matters," Ángel Cabrera wrote in an email to faculty and staff Monday night, per the Washington Post. Though he did not specifically name the Koch donations in the email, a university spokesman confirms to the Times that's what he was referencing. Per the AP, the documents reveal agreements in which the Koch Foundation endowed"a fund to pay the salary of one or more professors at the university's Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank," and got the right to name two of the five members of each selection committee to choose the professors. The foundation reportedly had similar rights when it came to the committees formed to recommend a professor's dismissal. The documents were obtained after the group UnKoch My Campus filed a Freedom of Information Act Request. After the news broke, the Koch Foundation released a statement downplaying its influence and noting its current grant agreements do not include the same provisions. Cabrera also noted that all the agreements in question, which were made between 2003 and 2011, had expired except one, which has now been voided.