The great prestige of the University of Chicago, where Nobel Prize-winning free-market economist Milton Friedman long taught, has long been tied to its willingness to go against the academic flow — to chart an independent course midst the leftist tide that has engulfed U.S. campuses over the last decades.

But now, as Mal Kline demonstrates in a substantial paper, UChi is increasingly coming to resemble much of the rest of academe. By way of example, Kline notes that the campus is the current workplace of Steven D. Levitt, the self-described “rogue economist” who co-authored Freakonomics and who posits that legalized abortion leads to lower crime rates.

Kline proceeds to examine the scholarship of numerous new faculty members, who are ”more in the mold of the rogue economist who offered a disturbingly racial defense of abortion [for example, Kerwin Kofi Charles, who specializes in what he calls the “economics of disadvantage”] than the Nobel prize winner who defended capitalism.”

Kline also dissects looks at Jane Dailey’s magnum opus, “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown,” which he calls notable for its “sheer salaciousness.”

He also criticizes a paper by Christian Leuz, who has addressed why firms “go dark” or pull their registrations with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Kline faults Leuz for rejecting “out of hand the effect that recent federal regulations might have on the American stock market.”

Will the legendarily atypical UChi go the way of so much of the academy? Kline’s analysis of trendy hires and research at the university suggests, sadly, that this may well come to pass.