My last post on Alexandra Samuel’s proposal for excommunicating political scientists like Condoleeza Rice received this response from Jonah Goldberg saying that he was writing a book about the subject and wanted examples. So I thought that I would add another.
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. The story has been often told and some reports say that some of the letters and memos showing that this was a conscious effort on Virginia’s part survived to be seen by more open-minded members of the department in later years. A run-in with the Ford Foundation helped to crystallize university opposition to the best scholars that the department ever had and among the best ever to teach in any department at Virginia. One view was that they were on the wrong side of history.
Here is a comment that Coase made in an interview in Reason:
They thought the work we were doing was disreputable. They thought of us as right- wing extremists. My wife was at a cocktail party and heard me described as someone to the right of the John Birch Society. There was a great antagonism in the ’50s and ’60s to anyone who saw any advantage in a market system or in a nonregulated or relatively economically free system.
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.
For more discussion on excommunicating scholars, see Alexandra Samuel’s response and these posts from John Kalb, Jonah Goldberg, Jackal’s Lair, and Eugene.
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