CORES: Committee for Open Research on Economy & Society

From: “Thomas F. Rosenbaum” tfr@uchicago.edu
Date: August 18, 2008 9:46:36 AM CDT
To: cando@uchicago.edu
Cc: rzimmer@uchicago.edu, tfr@uchicago.edu
Subject: Fw: [Provost] Milton Friedman Institute

Dear Clifford:

Thank you very much for your thoughtful note.

Let me comment on a few of your points and, I hope, address at least some of your concerns.

First and foremost, no intellectual enterprise at the University will ever be for sale. I say that unequivocally and with great passion. “Special access” is envisioned to be an invitation to an annual lecture, regular notices of activities of the Institute, and public dissemination of working papers and reports. It is not access in terms of influence and it does not indicate any say over the intellectual approach and research directions of the Institute, and it never will.

Second, with regard to the search Committee for the Director, it is important to know that the Friedman Institute has no appointive powers. Hence, the Director will hold an academic appointment in the Department of Economics and/or the GSB and the members of the search Committee are, by University custom, voting members of those Departments. We have tried to constitute the Committee as broadly as possible given this constraint, with individuals who hold joint appointments in other parts of the University (e.g. the Law School and Sociology).

Finally, and more generally, I conceive of the Friedman Institute’s place in the University in a somewhat different way than you articulate. Rather than expecting the MFI to incorporate all points of view, I believe that our responsibility as administrators is to respond to the needs of all the faculty in ways that creates an appropriate intellectual portfolio. Every piece of the portfolio does not need to address every viewpoint, but the sum total needs to make a capacious and significant research statement for the University. Hence our support for the graduate aid initiative, the new library, the arts center, the chicago center for contemporary theory, the center for the study of race, politics and culture, the physical sciences and computation center, the new hospital pavilion, to name a few. In each, we look for intellectual prowess, faculty commitment and leadership, a world-wide discriminating research advantage, and endorsement from the Deans. We encourage alternate approaches to important problems and are fully open to significant new ideas in the area of economics and society.

I hope that these brief comments are helpful.

With only the best, Tom