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New from me: In Defense of the New College Takeover, also published with my bosses' permission over at Blocked & Reported. In light of the recent news that Ron DeSantis appointed Chris Rufo and a number of other conservatives to the board of hyper-progressive New College of Florida, I felt compelled to write a response to criticisms of the move from a number of people in the "heterodox" sphere, including my own bosses. The full piece is quite long, so I'll quote the third section below (with some edits for brevity), in which I make the case for serious diversity of thought not only within institutions, but between them:
Has there ever been a putatively left-wing economics department at any university? I think GMU is trying to copy the success of the Chicago School or models itself after it , which was/is a huge success. Neoclassical economic positions are more likely to attract funding and prestige compared to more heterodox alternatives. Many Nobel Prizes in economics were downstream of the ideas conceived or popularized by the Chicago School.
This seems as productive as having mechanical engineers debate CRT. In the first example you're talking across fields/domains, whereas the law example is across the same domain. Diversity of viewpoints should not mean having to shoehorn diversity where it's unproductive.
The University of Utah's econ department has been called Marxist pretty often. I mean UofU's raison d'etre is to be the anti-BYU so it kind of makes sense:
https://dailyutahchronicle.com/2018/04/16/us-economics-department-marxist-or-diverse/
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