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Monday, June 23, 2008

"Intellectual Diversity" means no Milton Friedman?

Several University of Chicago professors are protesting the university's plan to unveil a Milton Friedman Institute, because that would "reinforce among the public a perception that the university's faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity."

Say what? A Nobel laureate economist, and arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century, who made the "Chicago School of Economics" famous isn't good enough for the college he spent most of his career at? In the name of "ideological diversity" it is necessary to keep certain views off the campus?

The University of Chicago faculty is clearly oblivious to what the "public perception" of the university is. Sure, they've had a few free-market economics professors besides Friedman, but the U of C has the reputation of being a haven for left-wing ideologues. Heck, the most influencial book on the leftist control and indoctrination in academia, The Closing of the American Mind, was based on the U of C faculty.

Of the major Chicago universities (U of C, Northwestern, DePaul, Loyola, and UIC), I went to the "right-wing" one - and by that, I mean this.

Minding the Campus writes:

This kind of concern did not surface when one survey after another showed that campuses are dominated by liberal and Democratic professors. Instead we got rationalizations: conservatives weren't bright enough to climb the academic ladder, or they were too money-hungry to head for the campus at all. The lack of real diversity isn't bothersome to the protesters, but the "perception" created by naming a center for a famous, Nobel-winning, free-market economist is disturbing.
The FIRE is perhaps even more harsh:
I fear for the Center for Gender Studies, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, the Core curriculum courses on "Colonizations"—and even the History Department, which explicitly advertises an unequal commitment to "interdisciplinary and comparative history" versus other kinds of history. I am even more fearful for the entire School of Social Work Administration, which declares in its mission statement that "In most cases, alleviating distress requires an emphasis on helping individuals and families acquire the resources, skills, and authority to secure adequate solutions to their own problems." A witch-hunt for orthodoxy-like statements only leads to a lot of drownings of false witches.

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