10-14-2008
Faculty debate over the Milton Friedman Institute broke new ground in a panel discussion earlier tonight when one of the project’s main advocates expressed openness to renaming it.
“I think it’s a good idea. We could change the name,” said economics professor James J. Heckman, a member of the institute’s faculty committee.
The comment came in response to whether advocates of the research center would consider scrapping the name of the 20th century U of C economist whose scholarship helped define free-market economics. Opponents of the institute argue the name suggests bias towards Friedman’s views.
In an e-mail interview after the event, Heckman emphasized that he was not speaking on behalf of the institute’s faculty committee.
“This is what I should have said: I personally would not object [to renaming it]. However, it would probably cost the initiative a lot of support,” he said. “Short answer: I am open to any idea, but we should look at the costs.”
Two other faculty members were less yielding when audience members and other panelists pressed them to reconsider the institute’s name.
“On the topic of this name changing, I’d just want to know who’s going to be cutting the checks for us?” said economics professor Lars Peter Hansen.
Economics professor Grace Tsiang elaborated the point from her seat in the audience.
“To become a foremost research institute, we need more money than can be garnered from the tuition of students….You have to go to the donors with great big pocketbooks,” she said, adding that the association with Friedman will “resonate with the donors.”
That argument was unpopular with the three panelists who opposed the institute. Mathematics professor Melvin Rothenberg called it “the worst reason to name a research institute.”
When Heckman – a Nobel Laureate who was a colleague of Friedman’s at the U of C – indicated openness to a name change, audience members cheered. Some seemed to interpret his comments as a step forward for the more than 100 faculty members who signed a petition against the institute.
“I just wanted to say that I’m really pleased to hear your commitment to openness and to the change of the name,” said associate English professor Elaine Hadley from the audience.
The student-organized event was one of the first public discussions to include speakers from both sides of the debate, attracting vocal audience members from both sides, as well. Though largely cordial, the discussion got heated when the speakers accused one another of misinformation and vied to be heard.
The panel also included statistics professor Yali Amit and anthropology professor Marshall Sahlins arguing against the project.
The panelists debated Friedman’s controversial legacy while also addressing the nitty gritty of the research center and the role it will play at the U of C.
It was a public preview of some of the arguments that may figure heavily into Wednesday’s Senate meeting, which will be open only to faculty. U of C President Zimmer called for the meeting as the institute became a increasingly divisive issue on campus.
FYI: Student Rally at the Senate Meeting today
(Wednesday, October 15) at 2pm, meeting in the Main Quad.
The issue of the name is irrelevant. I am dissatisfied with the CORES faculty’s retreat from engaging with the politics behind Milton Friedman and his legacy. Silent throughout this otherwise well-organized event was any mention of the political stakes involved.
I concurred with Professor Heckman that Friedman’s influence in the authoritarian regime of Chile under Pinochet was irrelevant to this discussion. We must admit that Friedman was ostensibly concerned with the advancement of human freedom; however, his perspective was from the Right, and anyone on the Left should not be surprised that his good intentions, when opportunistically pursued, went afoul. The CORES faculty, however, did not raise a defense from the Left; to do so would have meant rehabilitating a different conception of freedom and what it means to struggle for it. Rather, they pressed the issue to the symbolic register in which Friedman is merely ‘bad to think’.
The authentic concern underpinning the idea for the event in the first place was to encourage discussion from a multiplicity of political perspectives. The University of Chicago, as even the Right-wing economists admitted, has long been a haven for inquiry on the Left. It has accomplished this by keeping a firm commitment to free inquiry and scholarship, more or less independent of vested interests that would distort it’s own ideals.
With the gradual shift in higher learning, however, the University is increasingly compelled to drop its commitment to free inquiry and adopt ‘competitive’ strategies relying on large, external investment. It should come as no one’s surprise that these new lines of inquiry will be funded and promoted, if not entirely then in part, by those with a Right-wing agenda.
The integrity of the modern University is the real issue, and with the economic crises currently rocking the world, the Left needs every space it can get to work through the most urgent issues of the day and formulate pertinent, critical scholarship.
The Milton Friedman Institute is a blow to the University’s ideals; not directly, however, but indirectly. The point is not that the Institute must be stopped or renamed, but that it must be compensated for by the University’s commitment to Left scholarship. This issue remains unaddressed, and I’m afraid continues to hang precariously in the balance. I was utterly disappointed by the event because no single person–neither student, graduate student, nor faculty–raised this as an issue of concern.
There is a famous mis-translation of the Communist Manifesto in Chinese, which when retranslated into English read: ‘Scholars of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your shame!’ In an almost Benjaminian moment, this ‘mistake’ is now appropriate for the present; if, that is, faculty and students come together politically, and not merely in the spirit of protest.
Greg Gabrellas
Platypus Affiliated Society
This article is biased. It also badly document what happened. After the debate, it was clear that lack of information and childish interpretation of facts are the source of inquiries about the name of the Milton Friedman Institute. The debate was a great and beautiful argumentation on how to do research and a call for the open minds that science is made of. The main message of defending facts, not doctrines, prevailed. I would like Maroon to make it clear next time.
"The University of Chicago, as even the Right-wing economists admitted, has long been a haven for inquiry on the Left. It has accomplished this by keeping a firm commitment to free inquiry and scholarship, more or less independent of vested interests that would distort it’s own ideals.
With the gradual shift in higher learning, however, the University is increasingly compelled to drop its commitment to free inquiry and adopt ‘competitive’ strategies relying on large, external investment. It should come as no one’s surprise that these new lines of inquiry will be funded and promoted, if not entirely then in part, by those with a Right-wing agenda.
The integrity of the modern University is the real issue, and with the economic crises currently rocking the world, the Left needs every space it can get to work through the most urgent issues of the day and formulate pertinent, critical scholarship."
Couple of issues: By Univeristy integrity I assume you mean, as you say earlier, that it has promoted "scholarship more or less independent of vested interests that would distort its own ideals." Scholarship guided by political concerns (which could mean everything from interpreting findings through an ideological framework to simply choosing objects of inquiry that reflect political or policy concerns), whether from the right or the left, would seem to distrub this integrity. Personally I think funding explicitly on political grounds would 1. never fly, 2. be extremely dangerous and have a more powerful effect on distorting scholarship. (Of course the response here is that the political influence is already there, it’s just obscured by the legitimizing influence of the administration. This brings me to the second point)
Secondly, you have to provide evidence or at least make some arguments about how partial funding from the right would distort economics scholarship. There are some compelling counterarguments, as stated in the roudtable: it would be less efficient to go through the institute to hire, there is a diversity of views within the department of economics itself, one of its main functions is to attract outside scholars. Unless you think that economics itself, or the mix of it that is present at the UofC, has some intrinsic or historical affinity with the Right. But you have to specify the relationship, simply making the insinuation doesn’t cut it.
Personally I’m not sure the institute would really ‘thicken’ the department’s connections to the Right.. which seem to be 1. piecemeal and informal, 2. largely mediated through think tanks that translate complex theory into soundbites, conventional wisdom, and the occasional policy.
To make the case for political distortion you’d have to specify what (manifest or latent) functions that institute might have.
If the name will draw in more money then should name it after Obama or Britney.