6 June 2008
President Robert Zimmer
Provost Thomas Rosenbaum
University of Chicago
5801 South Ellis Avenue Suite 502
Chicago IL 60637
Dear President Zimmer and Provost Rosenbaum:
We were interested to read President Zimmer’s recent message announcing the Milton Friedman Institute, with its 200 million dollar plus endowment and prime real estate location on campus. We understand that the University of Chicago’s association with Friedman has been important to its international reputation during the last four decades, and can imagine that the University reasonably sees benefit in cultivating a continued involvement with his school of economic thought.
Nevertheless, we are concerned about the project in which the University is now investing. The signatories of this document are not ideologically homogeneous, nor interested in advancing a single alternative view that we find more socially progressive. But we are all disturbed by the ideological and disciplinary preference implied by the University's massive support for the economic and political doctrines that have extended from Friedman's work. This is not a question of academic freedom, to be sure: we know that the work of scholars at the Milton Friedman Institute will not have a chilling effect on the development of other kinds of knowledge at the University. This is a question of the meaning of the University’s investments, in all senses. We are concerned, additionally, that this endeavor could reinforce among the public a perception that the University’s faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity. A variety of other specific concerns includes the following:
• Many colleagues are distressed by the notoriety of the Chicago School of Economics, especially throughout much of the global south, where they have often to defend the University’s reputation in the face of its negative image. The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive. Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world's population, leading to the weakening of a number of struggling local economies in the service of globalized capital, and many would question the substitution of monetization for democratization under the banner of “market democracy.”
• When the University of Chicago invests so heavily in culturally and politically conservative thought we wonder about its commitment to strong intellectual diversity in the tradition of the Kalven Report. Consider, for instance, the following passage in the Proposal to Establish the Milton Friedman Institute, which construes a certain orthodoxy as the starting point for any discussion: "Following Friedman’s lead, the design and evaluation of economic policy requires analyses that respect the incentives of individuals and the essential role of markets in allocating goods and services. As Friedman and others continually demonstrated, design of public policy without regard to market alternatives has adverse social consequences." Given the fact that our University is known for its commitment to interdisciplinarity, methodological diversity, and to discussion across political lines, some colleagues seek to secure these principles in both the structure and governance of the Institute and feel this commitment is belied by the Institute's founding documents. Some colleagues are disturbed by the specter of the University of Chicago becoming another Stanford, with the Milton Friedman Institute taking on the imposing campus presence of the Hoover Institution. Many of us are also perturbed that other units of the University that routinely engage the issues that the Friedman Institute is designed to address were not included in the planning, nor included in the ongoing core scholarly endeavors of the Institute.
• In the interests of equity and balance, many of us feel that
the University ought to reconsider contributing to the proposed
Milton Friedman Institute, which will inevitably be a powerful magnet
for scholars and donors who share a specific set of interests and
values to the exclusion of others, whether this is openly
acknowledged or not. Still others believe that, given the influx of
private contributions to the MFI, the
University now has the
opportunity to provide roughly equivalent resources for
critical
scholarly work that seeks out alternatives to recent economic,
social, and political developments.
Virtually all of us are distressed by the position the University has taken and by the process through which decisions have been made. We would ask to meet with you at your earliest convenience.
Sincerely yours,
Hussein Agrama,
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
Muzaffar
Alam, Carl Darling Buck Professor, Department of South Asian
Languages and Civilizations and the College
Yali Amit,
Professor, Departments of Statistics and Computer Science
Clifford
Ando, Professor of Classics
Leora Auslander, Professor,
Department of History, Committee on the History of Culture, Committee
on Jewish Studies, and the College
Ralph Austen, Professor
Emeritus of History
Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman
Professor, Department of English
Michael Bourdaghs,
Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Mark
Bradley, Associate Professor of History
Bill Brown, Edward
Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor, Departments of English
and Visual Arts; Committee on the History of Culture
Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor,
Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and
History
Tamara Chin, Assistant Professor of Comparative
Literature
Kyeong-Hee Choi, Associate Professor of East
Asian Languages and Civilizations
Cathy J. Cohen, David and
Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science
Jennifer
Cole, Associate Professor, Dept of Comparative Human Development
Jean Comaroff, Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny
Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social
Sciences
John Comaroff, Harold H. Swift Distinguished
Service Professor in Anthropology and the College
Raúl
Coronado, Assistant Professor, Department of English
Bruce
Cumings, Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor
in History and the College
Michael C. Dawson, John
D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science and the College
Hilary
Parsons Dick, Postodoctoral Lecturer, Department of Anthropology,
Center for Latin American Studies
Michael Dietler, Associate
Professor of Anthropology
Fred Donner, Professor of Near
Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Prasenjit Duara,
Professor of History and East Asian Languages & Civilizations
Darby English, Associate Professor of Art History
Jacob
Eyferth, Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and
Civilizations
Christopher Faraone, Frank Curtis Springer and
Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor of Classics
James
Fernandez, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
Pedro
Felzenszwalb, Department of Computer Science
Norma Field,
Robert S. Ingersoll Professor of Japanese Studies
Cornell
H. Fleischer, Kanuni Suleyman Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish
Studies
Richard Fox, Assistant Professor of History of
Religions
Rachel Fulton, Department of History and the
College
Susan Gal, Mae and Sidney G. Mead Distinguished
Service Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics Leela Gandhi,
Professor of English
Michael Geyer, Samuel N. Harper
Professor of German and European History
McGuire Gibson,
Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology, NELC, Oriental Institute
W.
Clark Gilpin, Margaret E. Burton Professor of History of Christianity
Andreas Glaeser, Associate Professor of Sociology and of
the Social Sciences in the College
Jan Goldstein, Norman
and Edna Freehling Professor of History
Robert
Gooding-Williams, Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor, Department of
Political Science and the College
Ramón A.
Gutiérrez, The Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished
Service Professor of History
Susan Gzesh, Lecturer in Law,
Director, University of Chicago Human Rights Program
Elaine
Hadley, Associate Professor, Department of English
Miriam
Hansen, Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the
Humanities
Department of English / Committee on Cinema and
Media Studies
Donald Harper, Professor of East Asian
Languages and Civilizations
Neil Harris, Preston and
Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus, Departments of History, Art
History Elizabeth Helsinger, John Matthews Manly Distinguished
Service Professor, Departments of English and Art History
Thomas
Holt, James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Service Professor of
History
Paola Iovene, Department of East Asian Languages
and Civilizations
Travis A. Jackson, Associate Professor of
Music and the Humanities
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson,
Assistant Professor of British History
Matthew Kapstein,
Numata Visiting Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and the
History of Religions in the Divinity School
John Kelly,
Professor, Department of Anthropology
Robert L. Kendrick,
Professor of Music
James Ketelaar, Professor of History and
East Asian Languages & Civilizations
Emilio Kourí,
Associate Professor of History, Director, Katz Center for Mexican
Studies
Loren Kruger, Professor, Departments of Comparative and
English Literatures, African Studies, Theatre and Performance
Studies
Laura Letinsky, Professor, Department of Visual
Arts
Bruce Lincoln, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of the
History of Religions
John A. Lucy, Department of Comparative
Human Development
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Associate Professor,
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Center for Latin
American Studies
Amanda Macdonald, Visiting Assistant
Professor, Department of English
Patchen Markell, Associate
Professor, Political Science
Françoise Meltzer, Mabel
Greene Myers Professor of Comparative Literature, Romance Languages,
and Divinity
Janel Mueller, William Rainey Harper
Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of English
Matam P.
Murthy, Professor Emeritus, Department of Mathematics and the
College
Joseph Masco, Associate Professor, Department of
Anthropology
William Mazzarella, Assistant Professor,
Department of Anthropology and the College.
John P.
McCormick, Professor, Department of Political Science
Bernard
McGinn, Naomi Shenstone Donnelly Professor Emeritus of Theology,
History of Christianity, and Medieval Studies
Omar M.
McRoberts, Associate Professor of Sociology
Jason Merchant,
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics
Stuart
Michaels, Associate Director, Center for Gender Studies
W.J.T.
Mitchell, Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor,
Departments of English and Art History
Nancy D. Munn,
Professor Emeritus, Anthropology
Deborah Nelson, Associate
Professor, Department of English; Chair, Center for Gender
Studies
David E. Orlinsky, Professor, Department of
Comparative Human Development and Social Sciences Collegiate
Division
Stephan Palmié, Associate Professor of
Anthropology
Moishe Postone, Professor of History
Francois
G. Richard, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
Seth
Richardson, Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History
Mel
Rothenberg, Professor Emeritus, Dept of Math
Danilyn
Rutherford, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and
Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory
Marshall Sahlins,
Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology
Emeritus
Mario Santana, Associate Professor, Department of
Romance Languages and Literatures
Julie Saville, Associate
Professor of History
William Sewell, The Frank P. Hixon
Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and History
Emeritus
Bart Schultz, Director of the Civic Knowledge
Project and Senior Lecturer in the Humanities
William
Schweiker, Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of
Theological Ethics
Dan Slater, Associate Professor, Department of
Political Science
Joel Snyder, Professor of Art History,
Visual Arts, and the College
Amy Dru Stanley, Associate Professor
of History
Richard A. Strier, Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished
Service Professor
Katherine Fischer Taylor, Associate
Professor of Art History
Russell H. Tuttle, Professor in
Anthropology, Committee on Evolutionary Biology, Morris Fishbein
Center for the History of Biology and Medicine, and the College
Theo
van den Hout, Professor in the Oriental Institute and Dept. of Near
Eastern Languages & Civilizations Candace Vogler, Professor,
Department of Philosophy
Kenneth W. Warren, Fairfax M. Cone
Distinguished Service Professor, Department of English
Lisa
Wedeen, Professor of Political Science
Christian Wedemeyer,
Assistant Professor of History of Religions
Anthony C. Yu,
Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in
Humanities
Tara Zahra, Assistant Professor of History
Rebecca
Zorach, Associate Professor, Department of Art History