Stigler envisioned professors as market competitors untethered from home universities
Evidence
Following Stigler’s blueprint, professors would be uprooted from their home universities, forced to bid for teaching space, and hence would cobble together a full-time teaching load across institutions. Stigler did throw out a suggestion for a nationwide standardized test, to make students more serious about “hiring” quality professors, but he did not devote a great deal of attention to it: undergraduate instruction was mostly a distraction, and so improving it did not concern him. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 139
Categorization
- XREF: Stigler’s blueprint reads like an early intellectual blueprint for what eventually befell US adjunct professors — relevant to the current adjunctification-of-academia debates. — connects to: Stigler proposed dismantling US universities to separate elite research from market-driven teaching — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 139; 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; George Stigler combined formal economics, pro-market politics, and intellectual self-promotion — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 104
- QUESTION: Did any Stigler-influenced reform actually adopt the cross-institution cobbled teaching-load model, or did the standardized-test suggestion win instead?
Broader Connections
- Stigler proposed dismantling US universities to separate elite research from market-driven teaching
#expands(0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 139 - George Stigler combined formal economics, pro-market politics, and intellectual self-promotion
#corroborates(0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 104 - Stigler treated the university as a threat to research elites rather than their home
#expands(0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 142