George Stigler shifted from defending trustees to wanting private institutes to direct research.

Evidence

We still know remarkably little about how neoliberals reacted to changes in their own primary places of employment—universities—and what influence, if any, they had on higher education. … In his chapter, Edward Nik-Khah follows one such storyline through Chicago economist George Stigler. Beginning as an advocate of trustees as guardians of academic freedom against the student-as-customer, Stigler shifted after the campus unrest of the late 1960s towards a distrust of trustees themselves. He ended by advocating that research be hived off from instruction. Instead, privately funded institutes should produce knowledge directly respondent to the demands of the broader marketplace. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 35

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s maps of how key neoliberal figures evolved doctrinally across the 1960s-70s; Stigler’s trajectory rivals Hayek’s and Friedman’s as a data point. — connects to: Stigler treated the university as a threat to research elites rather than their home — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 142; Stigler blamed egalitarian public funding of universities for declining research quality — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 121
• SEED: Article angle: ‘the neoliberal university’ predates the modern adjunct crisis — tracing Stigler’s mid-century pivot from trustee defense to privatized research institutes as the genealogy of today’s patent-driven, customer-facing university restructuring.

Broader Connections

• Stigler treated the university as a threat to research elites rather than their home #complicates (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 142
• Stigler blamed egalitarian public funding of universities for declining research quality #expands (0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 121