Kelly Markson writes for the Martin Center about a recent community college event featuring a “controversial” speaker.

By now you have heard the story. It plays out like a script. A “controversial” speaker—almost always a conservative or libertarian—is invited to a campus. Protests, and in some cases riots, ensue. The speech is canceled or the speaker shouted down. The free exchange of ideas gives way to authoritarianism.

But consider what happened recently at Wake Technical Community College, where I teach. We threw out that script, and free speech prevailed. Students were able to listen to and learn from James Otteson, a “controversial” Wake Forest University (WFU) economics professor, who gave a talk titled “Adam Smith on Justice and Social Justice.”

WFU, on the other hand, hasn’t been so welcoming to Otteson, especially after he established the Eudaimonia Institute on his campus. The goal of the Institute, says Otteson, is to bring “perspectives from philosophy, psychology, political science, and more” to “help us understand how to encourage genuinely flourishing human lives of meaning and prosperity.” (“Eudaimonia” is Aristotle’s term for human flourishing.)

The initial funding for the Institute came from a planning grant from the university. Its faculty advisory board is comprised of 14 tenured professors from 10 different departments. None of this has been controversial. But what is controversial, at least to many WFU faculty, is that Otteson recently accepted roughly $3.7 million from the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) to help support the institute over five years.