In the WSJ, John Hardin of the Charles Koch foundation writes about American Bridge’s attempts to FOIA emails.

College should be a place where students encounter a diversity of ideas—just ask many of the more than 1.8 million students who are graduating this year. That diversity often relies on charitable foundations, which support countless educational programs across the country. For example, the Charles Koch Foundation, where I work, has responded to hundreds of grant requests from colleges and universities. These requests have led us to support educational initiatives in economics, philosophy, entrepreneurship, criminal justice and other disciplines at more than 250 institutions of higher learning.

Yet student access to a broad range of ideas is under assault. Across the country, political groups from outside the academy are organizing campus crusades to silence those with whom they disagree.

Look at what’s taking place at Mississippi State University. The school will soon launch its new Institute for Market Studies, which was made possible in part by a $365,000 grant from our foundation. Yet before the first book could even be opened, the political-action committee American Bridge filed an open-records request seeking emails between professors and between the school’s faculty and our foundation. This overtly political fishing expedition is designed to intimidate the faculty at MSU, discouraging them from participating in the new institute.

Strong-arm tactics such as these have no place on a college campus, but the MSU incident is not unique…

Left-leaning groups are not the only users of pressure tactics. Organizations on the right, such as state Republican groups, have targeted professors with whom they disagree as well. Recently, a University of Wisconsin professor was singled out for espousing ideas with which they disagreed.

Regardless of who initiates them, these attacks are typically organized by political special-interest groups, which mask their true motives by claiming to seek “transparency” in the funding relationships between universities and philanthropists. Yet they only target those with whom they disagree, and the information they claim to seek—the amount of money provided and its purpose—is almost always already publicly available. The grants they target also follow the standards laid out by each university and were thoroughly reviewed by faculty and administrators.

I was the subject of a similar attempt a few years ago, and a number of conservatives came to my defense, such as Eric Rasmussen. This is an issue of academic freedom which should unite left and right.