McCarthyism of the Left -- The Academy

Another example of the hypocrisy of The Left.

In the 1960s, just AFTER Ronald Coase had done his Nobel Prize winning work in law & economics and AFTER James Buchanan had done his Nobel Prize winning work in public choice, a concerted effort was made by members of their department and the administration at the University of Virginia to drive them out of Virginia. . . .

Since Coase and Buchanan had tenure, they couldn't be fired, but Virginia decided not to make an attractive offer to keep Coase when Chicago offered him a job, though Coase has said that he might well have stayed had they done so. Buchanan was driven out in part by not tenuring his junior colleagues. That this was done a few years after Coase and Buchanan had done their best work is just stunning. Virginia began the 1960s as the most innovative and creative among the world's great economics departments and ended the 1960s as just another pretty good department, no better or worse than a couple dozen other departments in the country.

Good to hear Jonah Goldberg is writing a book on this topic. The recent nonsense involves the "excommunication" of Condi Rice from the academy.

Universities today are nothing but educational gulags. And, the student and parents get to pay for the privilege of being indoctrinated!