Free Republic

Chicagonomics Malcolm A. Kline, April 30, 2010 Sometimes academics make plausible assertions, if you buy their premises, ignore their assumptions, and don’t look for the evidence to back them up. “The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every corner of the world,” University of Chicago law school professor Martha C. Nussbaum writes in Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs The Humanities. “Seen by policy-makers as useless things in order to stay competitive in the global market, they are rapidly losing their place in curricula, and also in the minds and...

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...

U-Chi’s Dishonorable Faculty by: Deborah Lambert, July 17, 2008 When news surfaced that a research institute was to be established at the University of Chicago in honor of the late Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman, nearly 100 faculty members signed a petition, “objecting to any such enterprise that might place a stamp of approval on Professor Friedman’s economic theories,” according to James Piereson, reporting on the newcriterion.com. One of the major gripes was that this choice “would signal to the outside world that Chicago’s faculty ‘lacks intellectual and ideological diversity’” when in fact it implies “that the left leaning faculty...