There’s a zany dispatch at American Digest about the faculty feud at the University of Chicago over naming a campus research center after Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman.

Here’s the gist of the story:

In a letter to U. of C. President Robert Zimmer, 101 professors—about 8 percent of the university’s full-time faculty—said they feared that having a center named after the conservative, free-market economist could “reinforce among the public a perception that the university’s faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity.”

One of the main opponents of naming the center after Friedman is U.C. divinity professor Bruce Lincoln, who trunpets his commitment to intellectual diversity by teaching a course critical of “The Theology of George W. Bush.” Lincoln is shaking in his boots:

’It is a right-wing think tank being put in place … The long-term consequences will be very severe. This will be a flagship entity and it will attract a lot of money and a lot of attention, and I think work at the university and the university’s reputation will take a serious rightward turn to the detriment of all.’

AD takes a gander at “Lincoln’s less than distinguished CV”:

“[Lincoln’s] research tends to focus on the religions of pre-Christian Europe and pre-Islamic Iran, but he has a notoriously short attention span and has also written on a wide variety of topics, including Guatemalan curanderismo, Lakota sun dances, Melanesian funerary rituals, Swazi kingship, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Marco Polo, [and] professional wrestling …
Lincoln evidently labors over his patented George Bush Decoder ring ( Week in Review > Code for Vote for Me: Speaking in the Tongue of Evangelicals”> Code for Vote for Me: Speaking in the Tongue of Evangelicals) as his excuse for an original contribution to knowledge. Oh yes, he also believes that Christian fundamentalists are very bad and was shocked, shocked at Abu Ghraib:
Only when Seymour Hersh, our modern Ctesias, secured publication of these photos were the signs of hero and villain inverted, so that a broad audience could read the story as one of moral depravity. FROM ARTAXERXES TO ABU GHRAIB: ON RELIGION AND THE PORNOGRAPHY OF IMPERIAL VIOLENCE

AD, with his grand sense of the ridiculous, counters:

You’ve gotta love a mind so colonized by lock-step thinking and swollen with self-importance that it could toss off the phrase “Seymour Hersh, our modern Ctesias.” I can just hear the deep internal chortle when that one rolled out of the keyboard. He probably sipped sherry over it for months at the faculty club.
Having a drudge like Lincoln call to reject a real intellect such as Friedman only underscore the leading affliction in the Groves of Academe today: Intellectual Insanity, a dread disease that cripples and kills minds that might otherwise have been used to ask the universe: “Do you want fries with that?”