University of Chicago Professors Upset With Free Market Economics - Who Knew?
Posted on | June 21, 2008
The University of Chicago, to honor the passing of Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman announced the establishment of the Milton Friedman Institute. One Hundred of the faculty recently signed a letter protesting the Universitie’s commitment to the project. Their complaint:
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. The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive. Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world’s population, leading to the weakening of a number of struggling local economies in the service of globalized capital, and many would question the substitution of monetization for democratization under the banner of “market democracy.”
They are upset that the institute - like its namesake - will promote the benefits of free market economics, which they specifically blame for the woes of “local economies in the service of globalized capital”. In other words, in their weekly coffee klatch around the table in William Ayers office (valued Barack Hussein Obama confidant - and self avowed U.S. raised domestic terrorist), they all discovered that it was counter to the principles of free and open debate to have the views of Milton Friedman ensconced in an Institute to give them further life. In other words they had hoped that his thoughts had died with him and were long buried.
Indeed, they not only want his words lain on the scrap heap, they had another suggestion for the resources the university had committed:
In the interests of equity and balance, many of us feel that the University ought to reconsider contributing to the proposed Milton Friedman Institute, which will inevitably be a powerful magnet for scholars and donors who share a specific set of interests and values to the exclusion of others, whether this is openly acknowledged or not. Still others believe that, 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.
Translation - perpetuating bad theory is counter to us controlling the academic discussion, but we would welcome an institute that promotes say - Communism - as a legitimate alternative to the thoughts of that dead, stinking, conservative fool who believed in capitalism. This is really rich, they use the old “promote diversity” argument to squash “diversity”.
This is the link from which I drew the quotes from the letter. You need to go read it. The blog belongs to one of the professors that signed the letter. You will fall over laughing (and crying at the same time) at the sickness that has rotted itself into the real of academia.
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