The "Chicago School": What It Really Is and Why It Matters

The "Chicago School": What It Really Is and Why It Matters: Guest column by Matthew G. Andersson (posted February 12, 2021, by Mary Grabar): 

[A] return to normalcy will require subduing radical factions that agitate for oppression. Restrictions such as mask mandates are like oxygen to followers of radical fundamentalist Covidianism — the abiding belief that only lockdowns, social distancing, and masks can deliver us from the deadly pandemic. The longer mandates stay in place and experts continue promoting mask use — “My mask protects you! Your mask protects me!” — the stronger and more widespread the extremism will grow, and the less influence experts will have over their behavior.  Georgi Boorman] The Federalist, 22 September 2020

Non-objective law is the most effective weapon of human enslavement: its victims become its enforcers and enslave themselves.  Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government

Universities and colleges are working to adapt and respond to a mix of information, signals and intentions concerning the Covid phenomenon, especially involving what conditions will be imposed in order to fully “re-open”  (the assumption that a state of normalcy will greet everyone at the other end of current “lockdown” and other related “orders,” is not reasonable). Those have fairly significant policy implications that may range from screening, testing and vaccination (increasingly seen as “at gunpoint”), to tracing, profiling and tracking, among other authoritarian methods under consideration, including “health passports.”  The modern university campus may eventually resemble the modern airport in how students, faculty, staff, alumnae and visitors are processed, screened and approved for entry onto the campus and its facilities.  The scope of such institutional reactions will be comprehensive, as the reputational stakes are thought high: divergent thinking, or a challenge to consensus, is often deemed dangerous, conspiratorial, or even sociopathic. 

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Samizdat, Beautiful Italy, January 10, 2021

Posted by Mary Grabar, January 10, 2021: What is samizdat? I learned about it while taking a two-week writing seminar in Prague. According to Merriam-Webster it was a method "by which government-suppressed literature was clandestinely printed and distributed." This happened in the Soviet Union and "countries within its orbit." Recent events have reminded me of that lecture by a writer who had experienced such persecution and censorship. So please distribute this link via Dissident Prof and not the article or video because they are being censored and blocked by social media. Thank you.

News from Italy.

Photo credt: By Megan Mallen - Flickr: Piemonte, Italy, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16210487

A New Direction or the Status Quo for University Leadership: The Case of the University of Chicago

By Matthew Andersson, M.B.A. 1996, The Booth School of Business, University of Chicago (posted by Mary Grabar, November 23, 2020); 

As at other universities, in the search for a new president of the University of Chicago, we should be aware of security concerns regarding alliances with foreign powers, especially China.

The higher education sector is perennially in the news for a number of reasons: they include the exploding student debt challenge; sky-high tuition costs; politically correct curricula and speech accommodation; ideological bias and propagation; and the current impacts on campus operations due to the covid phenomenon, which is having a devastating impact on university finances, and faculty and student morale. The higher education sector is crying out for leadership.  It tends to change hands very slowly, and like modern public corporations, it generally resists change.  One university is a current case example, and may be instructive for the larger university and college industry.

One of America’s most storied institutes of higher education, the University of Chicago, has established a formal search for a new president.  As university presidents report to their Boards (like commercial corporations), the governance bodies are charged with filling this administrative role, and to a unusual degree are highly dependent on it, as most university boards (or regents, fellows and other structures) consist of volunteer executives who look on a university or college board seat as a kind of philanthropy, and rarely have any formal experience in any educational institutions.

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