The New Chicago School

Accuracy in Academia ^ | January 8, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

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The New Chicago School

Malcolm A. Kline, January 8, 2010

The college where Nobel Prize-winning free market economist Milton Friedman hung his hat for many a decade—the University of Chicago—has had a well-deserved reputation for going against the academic grain that at least dates back to the tenure of its former president Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977) during the Great Depression. By a happy coincidence, the conservative icon and the hero of liberals overlapped.

In the decade that we’re in right now, though, UChi is arguably most famous as not only a former place of employment for the Obamas and their friends but as the current workplace of Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics. A self-described “rogue economist,” Dr. Levitt posits that legalized abortion leads to lower crime rates.

When conservative commentator William J. Bennett attacked this thesis on the air during his radio show, liberal activists and so-called mainstream media outlets successfully characterized the pugnacious pundit as a proponent of the very theory he denounced—Levitt’s. Bennett kept a noticeably lower profile after that 2005 broadcast but Levitt’s place of employment has flourished.

“Last year was record setting in development as the University raised $284 million toward the campaign goal of $2 billion,” UChi Provost Richard P. Saller reported in his annual report for the 2005-2006 academic calendar year. In that same report, he welcomed 26 new faculty members granted tenure upon their arrival, half of them in the liberal arts and social sciences.

An examination of the papers written by this latter cohort, to use a term that is second nature to them, shows that they are more in the mold of the rogue economist who offered a disturbingly racial defense of abortion than the Nobel prize winner who defended capitalism....