Stigler proposed dismantling US universities to separate elite research from market-driven teaching

Evidence

Stigler began to contemplate radically reorganizing the dissemination and ratification of knowledge. He came around to Rogge’s position of supporting professors’ salaries by student fees, but not because he now had more confidence in students’ judgments. If anything, he was even more dubious: “Students—even college graduates—are poorly informed judges of teachers and universities.” Instead, it was because he was anxious to spin off teaching from research. This would leave most schools in the position of catering entirely to undergraduate instruction: “In a few schools the research function is paramount; in nearly a thousand others teaching is the dominant or exclusive function.” This was as it should be. Because undergraduate teaching distracted from both graduate instruction and research, it would be necessary to free elite scientists from such teaching responsibilities. As for the lowly undergraduate professors, they would be subject to the whims of the market—and possibly eliminated by it: “Instruction by direct fore-to-fore methods is an anachronism, left over from the days before books were available. Now the professor is an inspirational guide to the literature—a task which requires few class hours—and can usefully perform this task at numerous universities simultaneously.” 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

• SEED: A market-fundamentalist blueprint for higher education that predates MOOCs and gig-economy academic labor by decades — an essay on how gig-economy universities were imagined in the 1960s by a Chicago School icon.
• XREF: This directly extends Nik-Khah’s argument first developed earlier in the chapter about Stigler being untroubled by markets failing in knowledge; also speaks to the gig economy / platform capitalism literature on precarious academic labor. — 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; Stigler envisioned professors as market competitors untethered from home universities — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 139