CORES
In May 2008 the University of Chicago announced the intent to establish the Milton Friedman Institute with an initial endowment of 200 million dollars. The guidelines for this institute were detailed in a faculty committee report. According to the report the committee had initially been charged by President Zimmer, in May 2007, “to consider the possibility of creating a major new institute at the University on economics and society.”
The proposal to name an institute after Milton Friedman aroused objections from many faculty members across campus. Highly respected for his technical work in economics and a vigorous polemicist in popular media, Friedman consistently depicted the free market as the solution to all problems and saw government involvement as not only counterproductive, but an affront to human freedom. He was, however, happy to work with governments when they imposed the free market policies he favored—most famously Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (see Klein, Grandin). In the U.S., Friedman advocated for the abolition of social security, the privatization of education, and the legalization of drugs (see Krugman, and Rayack), consistent with his libertarian views.
Our view is that naming such a major institute after Friedman is a symbolic endorsement of his views by the University. The guidelines of the Institute, as detailed in the report (excerpted here), appear to reinforce this view. They indicate a very narrow research scope even within the field of economics, not to speak of the complete disregard for other disciplines involve in the study of “economy and society,” such as sociology, anthropology, and political science. Typically centers of such magnitude at the University of Chicago are meant to foster interdisciplinary work among faculty of different departments and divisions. This hardly seemed the goal in this case.
Finally, many faculty were troubled by the special status of donors to this Institute in the form of a Milton Friedman Society for donors of over one million dollars who would have a strong ongoing connection to the institute and its faculty. This plan seemed to indicate a move towards the privatization of research at the University and the cultivation of a symbiosis of scholars whose theories produce profits and a set of donors who then reinvest in those theories.
A letter detailing these objections, and signed by over 100 faculty, was sent to President Zimmer and Provost Rosenbaum on June 6, 2008. After several exchanges it has been decided to convene a meeting of the full University Senate in the fall quarter to discuss this matter. Further details of the exchange between the administration and this group of faculty can be found here.
Our faculty group has since constituted itself as the Committee for Open Research on Economy and Society (CORES). CORES initiated an online petition against the MFI, allowing for signatures from outside the University. The controversy has aroused intense interest in the mainstream media.