When I heard the news today that Donald Trump pardoned the four Blackwater contractors who murdered at least 14 people–including two children–outside the Green Zone in Baghdad in 2007, the first thing I thought of was the DeVos Institute.
Back in 2010, Michael Kaiser and the Kennedy Center secured major funding for their performing-arts consulting firm from the Dicky and Betsy DeVos Foundation, giving the family naming rights. It moved in 2014 from its Kennedy Center home to the University of Maryland, but it keeps offices in DC. According to its website, the DeVos Institute has provided consulting and training to over 1,000 organizations in over 80 countries.
None of that really has anything to do with Trump’s pardon, except a name: Betsy DeVos, who is the sister of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, and the man who made all the murder possible. It’s funny how free association works, because after reading of the pardon, I thought of the DeVos Institute, and then I thought of those two young children who died in Baghdad in 2007 thanks to the employees of Betsy DeVos’s brother, those kids are gone, for good. Now, whenever I hear about DeVos Institute going forward, I’ll be thinking about the murder of little children.
You might say that this is going a little too far, but one of the reasons why it’s so easy for me to think of the pardon as something I’d associate with the DeVos Institute is that there’s a general haze of malfeasance and evil surrounding the name. There are the young people struggling with student loan debt who were harangued by one of DeVos’s companies, or her psychiatric hospitals that institutionalized people unnecessarily so that they could collect the Medicare and Medicaid, or the hospital she owned where an elderly man was stomped to death while in its care.
As secretary of education, she’s provided protections for those who commit sexual assault and misconduct on college campuses, done everything she could to defund public education, and emboldened loan holders. On her way out the door, she’s incited education department employees to disobey the incoming administration. She’s shown loyal support for a traitorous president and his cronies (well, she’s one those cronies, I guess), and has supported the far-right through the Michigan Freedom Fund, which helped organize and promote last summer’s protests in Michigan.
The people that give to organizations matter. What they do and how they conduct themselves becomes as much about you and your organization as it does about them. Their moral ineptitude is yours; their sins are yours. In the recent past, we’ve seen organizations, some under duress, push donors away due to their ties to nefarious or socially destructive activities. The Metropolitan Museum of Art refused money from the Sacklers, who are largely responsible for the opioid epidemic, and the Whitney Museum forced Warren Kanders to quit its board due to his company’s production of tear gas. Surely, Betsy DeVos has enough baggage that the Institute bearing her name should at least contemplate an alternative moniker. Until they do, I’ll be over here, thinking bout her brother, his (now former) company, and the havoc it unleashed back in Baghdad when these young men killed twelve people for no reason.
Mark Likes Music 
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