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By VERNON L. SMITH | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: June 23, 2018 at 6:30 pm | UPDATED: June 23, 2018 at 6:31 pmA national controversy concerning Koch Foundation support for academic programs has invaded Chapman University’s new Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy. Controversy is not new: university campuses, public and private, are centers for experiment, innovation and change. That process is what constitutes American and academic freedom.
Below, I offer my views as to the underlying tensions in this controversy.
First, the vitriolic assault on SIPEP has obscured some facts.
ADVERTISINGNew institutes, programs, and initiatives depend vitally on donor funding. University-donor contracting is essential to that funding process. This is because “gifts” to a university are unenforceable promises to pay unless there is consideration provided in exchange by the university. If some past contracts have constituted donor “overreach,” as has been claimed, direct responsibility lies with the university, and concerned faculty are correct in holding their administrations accountable. Equally, the duty of donors is to articulate safeguards against infringement of donor intent by redirecting designated funds to unrelated uses.
Chapman’s administration deserves praise for its contractual integrity in protecting academic freedom while respecting the rights and obligations of donor intent. The Koch Foundation was a welcome tail-end addition to SIPEP’s initial local support base.
SIPEP’s program in Humanomics re-integrates economics with the humanities (literature, theater and the arts) — as it was before economics and other fields went their separate specialized ways during the past couple of centuries. In this initiative, SIPEP has sounded a chord that resonates well with undergraduates, lends itself naturally to faculty interdisciplinary research, and brings the same experience of discovery and self-actualization to the students. Moreover, as a minor, it does not distract and commonly complements whatever students chooses as their major.
If such re-integration were natural, it would have happened long ago before these fields became rigidly compartmentalized. Hence, various degrees of opposition come from economics, English, history, sociology, philosophy and so on.
Humanomics is a new entrant born of innovation. Incumbents in any organization instinctively resist new entrants, whether it is in a university, or in commerce and industry. Incumbents often seek to block or impede new entrants who upset the comforts of equilibrium. This is evident in claims that SIPEP seeks to attract and draw on students in English and other majors. On the contrary, the objective of SIPEP is to expose business majors to the moral foundations of our economic system. Humanomics is an interdisciplinary minor, based not on top-down lecture instruction, but on Socratic student-faculty interaction with scholarly writings and hands-on laboratory experiments, and the conversation and dialogue that follows. Students find this intellectually stimulating. To broaden that interaction, SIPEP invites and facilitate majors in liberal arts, mathematics and science to minor in Humanomics. For all these reasons we sought joint appointments and help in evaluation from the English department for professors Katherine Gillespie and Michael Moses.
In academia, one might expect this conflict resolution to involve the literature and methods that constitute the new versus existing intellectual programs. Rather, the incumbents claim political contamination by The Koch Foundation, based on guilt by association, but offer no evidence of actual contamination.
If the incumbent opposition has an argument based on the intellectual issues, they have not offered it.
It is claimed that many hires share the same “libertarian politics,” asserted not to be coincidental. But if those who study the literature and history of freedom, and engage new theory and philosophy of what it means to be free — its obligations and duties — lean to a liberalized outlook in social, political and economic affairs, this should be neither surprising nor cause for dark suspicion. This often takes the form of opposition to nationalistic policy interventions abroad, support for freer movement and migration of people, exploring a better criminal justice system than mandatory sentencing of young adults who in all generations are wont to do irresponsible things on the rocky road to maturation and greater opportunity regardless of ethnic, racial or gender origins.
The opposition calls it “conservative,” a flagrant abuse of English, as the language becomes inverted when people, not ideas, are targeted.
In like manner, if the social sciences generally attract scholars with anti-business, sometimes Marxist, sentiments, you need not harbor dark conspiracy theories to explain the political associations of faculty hires in these disciplines.
The consequence on all sides is a revival of guilt-by-association criteria of indictment, a development reminiscent of political dominance in the McCarthy-Nixon years of persecution of many great American citizens for alleged communist sympathies.
When loaded emotive language replace reasoned argument, as evidenced in an OC Register article, the process of experiment, innovation and change becomes the targeted victim.
Vernon L. Smith is the George L. Argyros endowed chair in finance and economics at Chapman University. He is the 2002 Nobel laureate in economics.
By VERNON L. SMITH | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: June 23, 2018 at 6:30 pm | UPDATED: June 23, 2018 at 6:31 pmA national controversy concerning Koch Foundation support for academic programs has invaded Chapman University’s new Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy. Controversy is not new: university campuses, public and private, are centers for experiment, innovation and change. That process is what constitutes American and academic freedom.
Below, I offer my views as to the underlying tensions in this controversy.
First, the vitriolic assault on SIPEP has obscured some facts.
ADVERTISINGNew institutes, programs, and initiatives depend vitally on donor funding. University-donor contracting is essential to that funding process. This is because “gifts” to a university are unenforceable promises to pay unless there is consideration provided in exchange by the university. If some past contracts have constituted donor “overreach,” as has been claimed, direct responsibility lies with the university, and concerned faculty are correct in holding their administrations accountable. Equally, the duty of donors is to articulate safeguards against infringement of donor intent by redirecting designated funds to unrelated uses.
Chapman’s administration deserves praise for its contractual integrity in protecting academic freedom while respecting the rights and obligations of donor intent. The Koch Foundation was a welcome tail-end addition to SIPEP’s initial local support base.
SIPEP’s program in Humanomics re-integrates economics with the humanities (literature, theater and the arts) — as it was before economics and other fields went their separate specialized ways during the past couple of centuries. In this initiative, SIPEP has sounded a chord that resonates well with undergraduates, lends itself naturally to faculty interdisciplinary research, and brings the same experience of discovery and self-actualization to the students. Moreover, as a minor, it does not distract and commonly complements whatever students chooses as their major.
If such re-integration were natural, it would have happened long ago before these fields became rigidly compartmentalized. Hence, various degrees of opposition come from economics, English, history, sociology, philosophy and so on.
Humanomics is a new entrant born of innovation. Incumbents in any organization instinctively resist new entrants, whether it is in a university, or in commerce and industry. Incumbents often seek to block or impede new entrants who upset the comforts of equilibrium. This is evident in claims that SIPEP seeks to attract and draw on students in English and other majors. On the contrary, the objective of SIPEP is to expose business majors to the moral foundations of our economic system. Humanomics is an interdisciplinary minor, based not on top-down lecture instruction, but on Socratic student-faculty interaction with scholarly writings and hands-on laboratory experiments, and the conversation and dialogue that follows. Students find this intellectually stimulating. To broaden that interaction, SIPEP invites and facilitate majors in liberal arts, mathematics and science to minor in Humanomics. For all these reasons we sought joint appointments and help in evaluation from the English department for professors Katherine Gillespie and Michael Moses.
In academia, one might expect this conflict resolution to involve the literature and methods that constitute the new versus existing intellectual programs. Rather, the incumbents claim political contamination by The Koch Foundation, based on guilt by association, but offer no evidence of actual contamination.
If the incumbent opposition has an argument based on the intellectual issues, they have not offered it.
It is claimed that many hires share the same “libertarian politics,” asserted not to be coincidental. But if those who study the literature and history of freedom, and engage new theory and philosophy of what it means to be free — its obligations and duties — lean to a liberalized outlook in social, political and economic affairs, this should be neither surprising nor cause for dark suspicion. This often takes the form of opposition to nationalistic policy interventions abroad, support for freer movement and migration of people, exploring a better criminal justice system than mandatory sentencing of young adults who in all generations are wont to do irresponsible things on the rocky road to maturation and greater opportunity regardless of ethnic, racial or gender origins.
The opposition calls it “conservative,” a flagrant abuse of English, as the language becomes inverted when people, not ideas, are targeted.
In like manner, if the social sciences generally attract scholars with anti-business, sometimes Marxist, sentiments, you need not harbor dark conspiracy theories to explain the political associations of faculty hires in these disciplines.
The consequence on all sides is a revival of guilt-by-association criteria of indictment, a development reminiscent of political dominance in the McCarthy-Nixon years of persecution of many great American citizens for alleged communist sympathies.
When loaded emotive language replace reasoned argument, as evidenced in an OC Register article, the process of experiment, innovation and change becomes the targeted victim.
Vernon L. Smith is the George L. Argyros endowed chair in finance and economics at Chapman University. He is the 2002 Nobel laureate in economics.