You could call this poetic justice, that the university that did more to foster extreme neoliberalism than any other is now being punished by that very ideology coming home to them, except that the UChicago economics department will be protected at all costs. It's the others who will suffer.
They literally announced PhD freezes at the damn social work school first and implied threats to the MSW program which literally! prints! money! for the entire university.
So the Board of Trustees got fooled by the CryptoRush. Crypto is too volatile to provide a stable financial basis. Oh and that large electricity consumption problem has not bee solved.
UChi Econ will post the “No. It’s the children who are wrong” meme before the week is out.
Maury Fox, former chair of the biology dept at MIT, told me that when he arrived as a faculty member (? 1950s) there were still classified PhD defense talks !! which, I think, is why MIT spun out all the DoD stuff to Lincoln Labs, so MIT could claim to be , in today's jargon, woke
Damn...that's the road to serfdom Mises was writing about eh? Owned by crypto-grifters. 😬
One of them is a Ricketts. Owners of the Cubs. Brother of former governor of, and now US Senator for, Nebraska. GOP to the core. All from family money. Never had to work a day in his life.
Yeah they'll just cut the art department. Or do what usyd did and roll it into Econ (????)
Or you could just call it what it really is, greed and stupidity. It’s not political
I had a professor of Jewish Studies at UChicago who made the administration very angry because every year he made a proposal for the university to create an on-campus memorial to the worldwide victims of the UChicago economics department.
👏👏👏👏
A giant bronze of a dagger mounted on a steering wheel
Having universities acknowledge the awful actions of their faculty and alumni is an interesting proposition. The damage that Milton Freidman and his acolytes caused in South America and Asia is incalculable.
Excellent
o7
Was this Sander Gilman, by chance?
A mensch.
I'm im the middle of a bio of Milton Friedman right now so this is extra 💀
Writing or reading?
When I was an undergrad, we bemoaned the work of Uncle Miltie!
good primer www.amazon.com/dp/B003KVKQB4
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago...
... I still have questions. In one paragraph it says Chile's GDP went down 15% and in another it says it was considered a success?
I fucking knew I was gonna see Reagan’s name involved with this shit
I worked (briefly) for the business school and would support this 100% lol
God-tier troll
That's amazing. This person might be one of my new heroes.
king. also talking of religion and murders at UChicago, did you see the recent book suggesting that Ioan Culianu's death was linked to Eliade's wife's ties to ultra-fascists?
Linku
www.amazon.com/Secrets-Lies...
I hadn't heard of Culianu, and I feel it's about rabbit-hole time now...
Yes! The writer of that book was also in the department where I did my doctorate, and while he was not one of my main advisors, I knew about that book when it was in manuscript form. Religion scholars love books that make our navel-gazing academic discipline seem exciting and dangerous.
To be fair an expert single shot to the dome from above while you're taking a dump in the Div School shitter after being threatened by Romanian fascists may be slightly more than performative.
real Sinologists know that certain of the field's elder scholars are immortal Scythian mummy-kings fighting out battles that once ravaged Central Asia through the form of bitchy footnotes.
I KNEW IT
Sadly the tradition of burying their grad students with them in the kurgan has been discontinued on most campuses, because of woke.
Wait, a kurgan is an actual thing, not just the name of the villain in Highlander?
Yes! en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan
So cool. I’d run across the idea of “the kurgan culture” from learning a little about the Proto-Indo-European language a few years ago. I had assumed that “The Kurgan” was a member of the culture. But I had no idea that a kurgan was a burial mound or a hypothesis. Yay Wikipedia!
Science!
Eliade himself was a member of the Iron Guard if I recall correctly.
I was at the uni when the assassination took place and one of my best friends found the body 😱
@kennethhite.bsky.social was in the next building over I believe
I was probably in foster hall
It was at noon in 1991 so I was probably at work in the Loop but your story is better
I must have used that bathroom a hundred times before learning that’s where he was murdered. Spooky.
Yes I was always scared of that bathroom afterwards
Vibes have always been off on that floor of Swift. I always thought it was me, but probably it was just the ghosts of fascism’s victims
Yes! 👻
www.chicagomag.com/chicago-maga...
I thought there was more to it than this.
wait wait Eliade’s wife was involved too???? (I assumed Eliade was connected, but never in a direct way there.)
Yeah she was very much a “I will protect my husbands name from those impure communists who want to smear him as a fascist”
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh — I knew I needed to read that book, but now I REALLY need to read that book!
oooh. Ioan = ioan not loan! Who do I need to blow to get cross bars on capital i fonts? They’re structural, not decorative serifs.
thank you, from someone whose first name starts with i 😭😭😭
O, I'd love to know more about that!
I don’t see hard evidence on crypto losses, but there is a 5% decrease in allocation to alternative investments, which wld include crypto. That’s not persuasive—but *any* allocation to a toxic pyramid scheme is appalling, even if—& perhaps *especially if*—it made money: it’s money fleeced from saps.
The economics department made them do it.
Are they "sound money" bugs? Because any research of actual conditions would show that deflation is terrible and that Crypto is a meaningless speculative assesset worse than tulips.
Beautiful.
Saieh Hall, which at time of acquisition was going to be named for Milton Friedman, used to be Chicago Theological Seminary. While they got a nicer building out of it, I still look at the old building, where I took classes, and curse the University for its desecration.
I’ll never forget that Good Samaritan water fountain!
lmfao that's amazing
Hell yeah.
That is gold.
This is hilarious, and how big would that memorial have to be
5 times the size of that plowshare they put on the site of pile 1.
Let's get this right: legendary hammer-and-sickle shadow thrower outside Pick Hall; Henry Moore's Nuclear Energy at site of pile 1 (just West of Regenstein library).
My bad, it’s been nearly two decades since I was last on campus for a quiz bowl tournament.
You’ll be amused that a colleague wrote in a rec letter for a UChicago quiz bowl star that he was on the university’s bowling team🙃 that too must be about two decades ago😎
You are forgiven:-)
1billion people
And now he can include the economics department itself amongst its victims. “I hurt myself today…”
Interesting. In my time there was only, I think, Medieval Jewish History. But there were victims of the econ department! It was when they were advising the Pinochet regime.
Too good!
My best regards to your professor from Chile, the country that was the guinea pig for the "Chicago Boys" carnage.
kinda sorta? www.atlasobscura.com/places/dialogo
Buy that man a cake. That's brilliant.
Wait who we talking about?
Because I would’ve assumed this was Lincoln but it was somebody else?
king
Let's not forget that Harvard gave us Putin.
Actual gigachad.
Who was it?
In terms of temperament, my best guess is James Robinson. But I am dying to know.
How ironic that the school of the Chicago School of Economics is certifiably lousy at making money in a capitalist economic system.
making money in a capitalist system is easy, its only when try to make the money fast is there problems. these "geniuses" should of course know this. should replace all of em. actions have consequences. smh
Ah but the genius of Chicago Style Economics is that those consequences get visited on someone else
Exactly these guys are academics for a reason
I got a UChicago shirt that says "that's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?" and. Well.
A poor comparison to the Keynesians. Made money on stocks, lost it all just to prove he could make it again
He has a good point.
Hero.
lmao that owns
Wow. That is chutzpah!
thats The Stuff
king
add one to the list bsky.app/profile/hami...
*sigh* well, where else are they going to put it
more specifically on the ruins of the Econ dept
I am just sad because they have one of the two best Assyriology departments in the world
amazing bit, that isn’t a bit.
Seems reasonable given the economic damage brought upon the world by the misguided economic policies of Friedman and others of the Chicago school.
I don't know about all of them, but, while Milton Friedman may not have been an obvious authoritarian creep like Rothbard, he was more blithely unconcerned with discriminatory effects than misguided on issues like public education. He helped push voucher systems that resegregated schools, after all.
Using Rothbard as something of a synecdoche for the contemporary peer-rivals of the Austrian school, for clarification.
beast mode
This rules.
I’d attend the ribbon cutting of that memorial.
🎖️
Absolute mensch.
Very hot and awesome of them
I wonder if this ever emerged as a scav hunt item “build that memorial” scavhunt.uchicago.edu
This is so beautiful it makes me speechless.
Holy shit that’s based
I just want to know if he was ever successful.
Who?
Oh, good, someone else has this question.
It's really a pity that the urban legend about the sculpture casting a hammer and sickle shadow on May Day turned out to not be true. uchiblogo.uchicago.edu/archives/201...
No longer “U Chicago Dept of Economics”. It’s “Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics”. And that says everything.
It genuinely would have never occurred to me that an old, prestigious university like UChicago could be in debt; I'm used to these institutions having enormous endowments from over a century of alumni donations.
i mean there's debt and there's DEBT