Moving to the Center
Scrapbook Moving to the Center There’s a splendid controversy brewing at the University of Chicago— at least we’ll consider it splendid so long as it has a happy ending, which now seems...
...These quiet nocturnal creatures are industrious to a startling degree, friendly to humans, resourceful and versatile on land and water, and monogamous in their private lives...
...An interesting objection, isn’t it...
...Yet the profs show no sign of backing down either...
...Last week 101 full-time faculty members sent a letter to the university’s president, Robert Zimmer, protesting the newly endowed Milton Friedman Institute, an on-campus think tank that will welcome visiting scholars doing research in economics and law...
...He and his allies insist that the Friedman center will have “no particular ideological slant,” and we believe him...
...Well, lots of people—less celebrated professors mostly...
...But it’s the beaver lifestyle that inspires respect...
...but in simpler times it was most famous as the academic perch of the great free-market economist Milton Friedman, who died in 2006...
...it’s really more like admiration...
...Beavers are the second largest variety of rodent in the world—the champion of the order is the capybara, native to South America —and easily recognized by their waterproof coats, shiny flat tails, and buck teeth...
...Scrapbook Moving to the Center There’s a splendid controversy brewing at the University of Chicago— at least we’ll consider it splendid so long as it has a happy ending, which now seems likely...
...A university where all but a handful of professors are on the cultural and political left risks losing its “ideological diversity” if it endows a center named after a non-leftist...
...After hovering near extinction a century ago in North America, beavers are plentiful now and, as this latest report suggests, on the comeback trail in Europe as well...
...And of course, they are the Frank Lloyd Wrights of the animal world: Introduce beavers to a river or stream, and soon a wooden/earthen dam appears, and then a multilevel lodge of mud and sticks, above and below the surface, housing infinite beaver generations...
...So when a prestigious university wants to name a research center after its most celebrated (Nobel prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, etc., etc., etc...
...Perhaps “affinity” is the wrong word for THE SCRAPBOOK’s attitude...
...The committee that proposed the center, including three Nobel-winning economists, expects to raise $200 million for a permanent endowment...
...Sentences We Didn’t Finish ‘Yes, there may be individuals in positions of great authority who call themselves ‘conservatives,’ and who have been accepted as such and even cheered on by the conservative movement for years...
...But now that their numbers are in the tank, it is plain that they are nothing of the sort...
...professor, who could object...
...President Zimmer met with a group of the objecting profs, but so far he’s refusing to back down, as might be expected of a college president who suddenly finds himself within sniffing distance of $200 million...
...Beaver dams are beneficial to the ecology—creating wetlands, nurturing growth—and balm to anyone who strolls in the woods and stumbles on evidence of beaver habitation...
...Most live on lakes and have no need to build dams, but two were deposited at a private estate on the Tale River in East Devon last year, and according to its owner, “A year after they came . . . they have built a dam and we think they are breeding...
...The U of C may be best known these days as home to the law school where Barack Obama used to lecture on constitutional law (twice a week...
...It really is a superb structure—quite a feat of engineering for two small beavers...
...We know the right will respond this way because . . . ” —Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal, June 18...
...Natural conservatives, perhaps...
...Their letter last week was a loopy masterpiece of its kind, objecting that allowing the Friedman center on campus will reinforce “a perception that the university’s faculty lack intellectual and ideological diversity...
...It’s hard to imagine it will have anything as pronounced as the ideological slant of the vast majority of the school’s other departments, where the standardissue, off-the-shelf liberalism of the American professoriate holds sway...
...Beavers were hunted to extinction in England and Wales as long ago as the 12th century —both for their pelts and for castoreum, a secretion of their scent gland which was believed to have medicinal properties—but a dozen or so have been imported from Germany in the past few years, and with encouraging results...
...What He Was Saying Nature News Despite our lack of an engineering degree, THE SCRAPBOOK feels a particular affinity with beavers—Castor Canadensis—and so was pleased to learn last week that a pair of European beavers are reported to have built what is believed to be the first beaver dam in England in hundreds of years...
...It’s been a while since we’ve seen such a lovely expression of the topsy-turvy worldview of the people who teach our sons and daughters...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 40
