Giant of Ideas Threatens Small Minds

The world lost one of its foremost intellectuals with the death of Milton Friedman in 2006. A Nobel Prize winner in economics, prolific author, adviser to several presidents and spirited advocate for a much freer society, Friedman added immensely to our understanding of how the world works.

Just a few months after his death, the president of the University of Chicago, where Friedman taught for many years, appointed a committee to consider the possibility of forming a new institute that would bring together scholars who would continue working along the many intellectual avenues Milton Friedman opened up. It’s not unusual for universities to honor distinguished faculty members and it would be natural for Chicago have a Milton Friedman Institute.

You can read the proposal for it here.

On May 14 of this year, the university’s president, Robert Zimmer, announced that the MFI would be established, with an endowment of $200 million. Its mission: “investigating research questions related to economic policy through the use of formal economic models with explicit empirical underpinnings.” This is, in short, a scholarly endeavor that will bring together leading economists to help advance research into key questions such as the relationship between economic growth and government institutions.

If you think that the MFI could just quietly get started, you don’t know what American universities are like these days. Soon after president Zimmer made the announcement, a group of more than 100 professors at the university, led by Divinity School professor Bruce Lincoln, began a protest. They sent Zimmer a letter detailing their grievances. What’s wrong with the MFI?

For one thing, say the complainers, “This endeavor could reinforce among the public a perception that the University’s faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity.”

The fact is that the faculty is diverse. If the opponents want to ensure that the public does not misperceive the university, all they need to do is to keep doing what they already do – writing and speaking. Fretting over this imaginary problem of public perception is no reason to pull the plug on the Institute.

Another thing that bothers the enemies of the MFI is that it might the university’s image because of the supposed damage that Chicago School Economics has done around the world: “Many colleagues are distressed by the notoriety of the Chicago School of Economics, especially throughout much of the global south, where they have often to defend the university’s reputation in the face of its negative image.”

Okay – assuming for a moment that problem of defending the university’s reputation in “the global south” is truly a burden for these professors (a notion that is extremely hard to credit), how much worse would it be if the university goes ahead with the MFI? Will the Marxists who denounce capitalism be any angrier because Chicago is sponsoring a group of scholars who are receptive to the idea that free markets often work better than coercive governmental policies?

Incidentally, the “global south” reference is revealing. Back in the early 1970s, after Salvador Allende was ousted from power in Chile and the ruling military junta faced an economy in crisis, several economists who’d studied at the University of Chicago advised the regime on policy questions, especially controlling inflation. Friedman himself gave some lectures in Chile on this point. But for leftists who hated the Pinochet regime for both its human rights abuses and for having stopped Chile from becoming another socialist paradise like Cuba, the Chicago economists became guilty by association. When Friedman went to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize in 1976, he had to endure chanting protesters who said that he was complicit in the regime’s record of killing and torture. There wasn’t a shred of truth in that, but to such people, truth isn’t important.

There are many other attacks on the MFI that are just as feeble as those, but let’s get down to nuts and bolts. The protesters say, “Given the influx of private contributions to the MFI, the University now has the opportunity to provide roughly equivalent resources for critical scholarly work that seeks out alternatives to recent economic, social, and political developments.”

In other words, “We want a bunch of the money, too.”

James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute makes this devastating appraisal of the contretemps at Chicago: “It was much to its credit that the University of Chicago provided an academic home to Milton Friedman during those decades in which his views were out of favor. It would now disgrace itself if, after those views have won broad assent in the marketplace of ideas, it chose to reject his example under pressure from know-nothings like Professor Lincoln.”

Milton Friedman was one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. He was not an orthodox conservative – he often spoke out against the “war on drugs” and did as much as anyone to put an end to military conscription – but to small-minded people the quality of his thinking did not matter. Friedman was not an ally in their desire for a bigger, more powerful state and therefore was fair game for all sorts of scurrilous attacks.

And that is why the MFI is now under attack. The sad truth is that many academics who talk about “diversity” can’t tolerate it when real diversity of opinion comes to campus. Rather than engage the kind of neoliberal, market-oriented analysis for which Friedman was famous and would be the hallmark of the work done at MFI, academics who like the cocoon of their socialistic views prefer to squelch it.

We have seen this before. When some non-leftist professors sought to create the Alexander Hamilton Center at Hamilton College, leftist opponents managed to strangle the proposal. You can read about that battle here. When Professor Mary Lefkowitz tried to point out that one of her faculty colleagues at Wellesley was teaching things that were demonstrably false, she was viciously attacked, a matter I recently wrote about here.

Seekers of truth do not shy away from arguments that challenge their beliefs. All we can conclude is that the University of Chicago, like many other schools, employs some faculty members who are not seekers of truth.