Stigler deliberately designed a contract-research institute as an authoritarian counter to university tenure.
Evidence
Stigler believed the university was beset by serious problems. He set out to construct an institution exempt from them. He would substitute contract research for tenure, thereby providing a director with clear lines of control in assigning research tasks to junior economists. This private research institute would provide “an authoritarian structure which is appropriate for contract research: there is authority over junior members (more than in the university) and hence a capacity for maintaining and discharging promises.” To view science as thriving on the curiosity of fresh minds called to science as a vocation was for Stigler misguided. Junior scholars would provide the “semi-skilled labor of research.” The best method of producing research would concentrate scholars in a setting freed from teaching obligations, removed from the inconvenient protection of tenure, and placed under the watchful supervision of an “authoritarian” master. In this way, Stigler hoped to impose the standards of an elite upon his profession. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 150
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s writing on sacrifice and hierarchy in institutions (ADDENDUM candidate), but more directly to how neoliberal thinkers deliberately inverted academic norms — a theme in the broader austerity/neoliberalism reading. — 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 planned a research institute to impose economics on social science — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 152
- SEED: Article angle: the private think tank as deliberate anti-university — how the architecture of policy-research organizations encodes a theory of who should control knowledge work.