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. 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!), but in simpler times it was most famous as the academic perch of the great free-market economist Milton Friedman, who died in 2006.

So when a prestigious university wants to name a research center after its most celebrated (Nobel prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, etc., etc., etc.) professor, who could object? Well, lots of people--less celebrated professors mostly. 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. The committee that proposed the center, including three Nobel-winning economists, expects to raise $200 million for a permanent endowment.

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. He and his allies insist that the Friedman center will have "no particular ideological slant," and we believe him. 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 standard-issue, off-the-shelf liberalism of the American professoriate holds sway.

Yet the profs show no sign of backing down either. 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." An interesting objection, isn't it? 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. ... It really is a superb structure--quite a feat of engineering for two small beavers."