The University of Chicago has a reputation as being one of the remaining American universities that has not succumbed to leftist domination. The school has resisted some of the worst traits of academic “progressives,” but is it really an exemplar?
In today’s Martin Center article, Matthew G. Andersson argues that it is not. He writes, “Of course, the Chicago Principles are functional as a first-order practice (that is, as a general, everyday campus observation or pledge). But their establishment can also have larger strategic purposes: They sound welcoming, mature, and independent, even if they turn out to be window dressing. In other words, they may be a curtain, behind which is more political partisanship than you might expect.”
Andersson shows that the university’s leadership is saturated with leftists and the once-formidable law school is now as bad as most others.
How about the famous economics department? Andersson writes that it ain’t what it used to be:
Yet even here, the university’s ability to maintain an objective, empirical posture is compromised by excessive “revolving-door” hiring of senior, partisan government officials. Former Obama administration economist Michael Greenstone heads up the university’s Becker Friedman Institute, along with “EPIC,” the UChicago energy policy institute that acts as an unofficial White House green-energy-policy center. (Note Greenstone’s active congressional lobbying.) Former Obama administration chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Professor Austan Goolsbee, is also an active political ideologue and casts many economic policy problems as if he were still representing the former president.
Very sad.