U of C faculty spar over Friedman institute
Professors at the University of Chicago are battling over a proposed $200 million research center named for Milton Friedman, the late Nobel-prize economist championed by conservatives for his free-market philosophy.
More than 100 faculty members signed a letter in June protesting plans for the Milton Friedman Institute as a misuse of university funds and an endorsement of the so-called Chicago School of economics, which favors limiting the role of government in the economy. Today the university will hold a faculty-senate meeting, the first in more than a decade, to discuss the institute.
Friedman, who died in 2006 at age 94, won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976. The proposed institute is intended to bring together Chicago faculty in economics, business and law, the university said. The academic focus would "reflect the traditions of the Chicago School and typify some of Milton Friedman's most interesting academic work," according to the proposal circulated by the committee to establish the institute. Critics say the institute won't be receptive to diverse points of view unless its mission is redefined.
"The University of Chicago has earned a reputation as a bastion of intellectual exploration and a forum for the vibrant debate of ideas, but the steps being taken to create a Milton Friedman Institute are compromising those principles," said Bruce Lincoln, a professor of the history of religion, in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
Lincoln, a spokesman for opponents of the institute, also criticized the meeting's format, which he said prevents an advisory vote of the faculty.
The senate, made up of about 1,200 professors and administrators, isn't a legislative body and votes only to elect a 51-member council, university spokesman Steve Kloehn said in an interview yesterday. The meeting was called by university President Robert Zimmer, who will address the faculty and open the floor for discussion, Kloehn said.
"The university thrives on ideas and debate," Kloehn said. "The university is comfortable about there being a robust debate over the institute."
The Friedman Institute will be funded with an initial $200 million from the university and supported with additional donations, according to the university.
The University of Chicago, founded in 1892, had an endowment of $6.2 billion as of June 30, 2007, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, a Washington-based trade group.
Friedman joined the University of Chicago in 1946. In his 1962 book "Capitalism and Freedom," he argued that political liberty stems from economic freedom.
Friedman helped train Chilean economists who worked for the dictator Augusto Pinochet and brought down inflation in that country in the 1970s and 1980s.
Friedman tarnished his academic credentials by trying to legitimize Pinochet after the 1973 coup in which thousands died, Yali Amit, a statistics and computer science professor, said at a debate on campus yesterday.
"If there are donors who want to give to the University of Chicago because the symbol of Milton Friedman induces them to do so, I'd like to not take their money," Amit said.
James Heckman, an economics professor who won the economics Nobel in 2000, replied that Amit, like other critics, overstated Friedman's link to Pinochet. The misconception was so prevalent that an entire generation of Latin American students refused to attend the University of Chicago after the 1973 Chilean coup, he said in an interview.
Friedman's research into how consumers save money, and how inflation and unemployment can rise in tandem, made him one of the 20th Century's leading economists, Heckman said.