Stigler blamed universities themselves, not student radicals, for campus politicization.

Evidence

In a paper intended for Irving Kristol’s The Public Interest, Stigler blamed the behavior of the students on the system of higher education: “There are many complaints today about our turbulent college students: should they not be directed instead at an educational system that offers so little to the ambitious and energetic young?” Even after the issues of the day had been resolved, fundamental problems would remain: “The forces politicizing the university, and turning it into a sort of faculty-student guild socialism, are not going to end the day the last infantryman limps out of Viet Nam …” The prospects were dim: “Who will dedicate his life to seeking to reverse the most powerful, most intelligent, most unrelenting, most sinuous university president in America—a man who does not even lack high purpose?” Stigler answered his own question: “I know that I shall not.” — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 137

Categorization

• XREF: A neoliberal economist locating the source of 1968 campus radicalism in the educational system’s own failure to challenge ambitious students — connects to later ‘culture war’ critiques and the argument that universities self-radicalize, which runs against the grain of seeing faculty/administration as victims of student militancy.
• SEED: Angle: how the ‘blame the universities themselves’ diagnosis of 1968 by Chicago economists seeded the later right-wing critique of academia and its disinvestment — an intellectual-prehistory piece.