The trouble with Friedman

tauringhuang.

Aug 7th 2008 | CHICAGO
From The Economist print edition

A doughty free-marketeer sparks controversy from the grave


EVERY big university has a scholar whose legacy lingers in hallways and classrooms, auditoriums and leafy quadrangles. At the University of Chicago no man looms larger than Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate who led the “Chicago school” of economics and who died in 2006. When the university announced plans for a $200m economics institute in May, it seemed fitting that the centre should be named after him.

But a small war broke out. On June 6th more than 100 faculty members wrote to the university’s president to protest against the institute. Armed with academia’s common weapons, indignation and verbosity, they said they were all “disturbed by the ideological and disciplinary preference implied by the university’s massive support for the economic and political doctrines that have extended from Friedman’s work”, and pleaded for time for discussion. The university has ploughed ahead. The institute was launched in July, though the search for a director continues.

Friedman has always been controversial. For some academics, “A Monetary History of the United States”, which Friedman wrote with Anna Schwartz, is one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Others deride Friedman’s work in Pinochet’s Chile and his insistence on all-powerful free markets. (“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert,” Friedman once said, “in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”)

“None of us deny that he was a major figure in economics,” explains Robert Kendrick, who signed the letter and is the head (on leave) of the music department. Rather, Mr Kendrick objects to what he sees as the institute’s ideological slant. Many fear that the university will be seen as intellectually homogenous. Susan Gzesh, who leads its human-rights programme, says that Latin Americans “don’t associate human rights with the University of Chicago; they associate it with Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys.” The institute, she says, may reinforce a monolithic view of the university.

Mark Hansen, the dean of social sciences, disagrees. This is not about advocacy, he says; “It is meant to be a research institute.” As for the university’s association with Friedman, many think–horrors of horrors—it is a good thing. Incidentally the Friedman institute will fill buildings now dedicated to God, a seminary at the heart of the campus.