By a preemptory decision of the University Administration, emeritus professors were excluded from participation in the Faculty Senate meeting last week where the proposed Milton Friedman Institute was debated. Although several of us went nonetheless, our attempts to speak to the issues were not recognized. Having given the best years of our lives to the University, we were thus prevented from giving it our worst years. The following is a summary of what we wished to say on the MFI and the politicization of the University:

The proposed Milton Friedman Institute is inherently political and doctrinal. We are being asked to invest the reputation of the University with 80 million dollars’ worth of a certain ideology—that has been historically linked with a certain inhumanity.
However much the promoters of the Institute assure us it will be politically impartial, they also insist on naming it for Milton Friedman because this “will honor the economist whose libertarian theories helped the spread of capitalist systems of government, and will attract donors from all around the world”—most notably the rich donors who can appreciate Friedman’s heroic role in “the big battle between socialism and free markets.” (All citations are from MFI mission statements or interviews with responsibles.) Presumably the scholars of diverse opinions who are to be attracted to the Institute will remain naively unaware of this ideological bias, but not the donors of one or two million dollars who, on the basis of their pecuniary credentials, will achieve a certain scholarly status themselves. As charter members of The Milton Friedman Society, they will have “special access to the people and work of the Institute”: a systematic integration of power with knowledge that will also function the other way around, by providing the Institute’s scholars “with connections to leaders in business and government.”
The words “Friedman” and “impartial” do not seem to go well together, any more than in Friedman’s philosophy the “political” and the “economic” are terms that can be separated. The MFI, according to its sponsors, will reflect the traditions of the Chicago School of Economics, particularly Friedman’s “advocacy of market alternatives to ill-conceived policy initiatives.” Among the “ill-conceived policy initiatives” that have figured in Friedman economics are public schools, national parks, consumer and worker protections, social security, subsidies for higher education, grants to scientists and artists, professional licensing and, in general, welfare measures that privilege economic fairness or equity. The abolition of these would be so many sequiturs of economic arguments. Never mind that when Friedman’s Platonic Ideas of free-market virtues are put into practice, as in Chile and the US, they have too often generated a systemic orgy of competitive greed—whose remedies, ironically, entail counter-measures of nationalization.
In a curiously analogous context, likewise involving the reduction of cultural values to material interests, Jean-Paul Sartre criticized a certain version of Marxism for adopting a method “identical with the Terror in its inflexible refusal to differentiate.” Stripped of historical contexts, social relations and biographical particularities, persons are reduced to conscious forms of economic functions. Here, then, is a pertinent warning about intellectual structures of inhumanity. It raises the question of whether the economics of Milton Friedman, in denying the values and social relations of compassion, equality, solidarity and community for the dubious effects of unrestrained self-interest will ever be able shake its historic association with state terror in South America. Or will the creation of a Milton Friedman Institute involve the University and us all in the same scandal? Will we all become “Chicago Boys”?

Ian Mueller, Janel Mueller, Mel Rothenberg, Marshall Sahlins