Stigler saw Levi as accommodating irresistible campus radicalism instead of resisting it.

Evidence

By Stigler’s reckoning, even some of his most trusted colleagues had abandoned their posts. In 1968, Edward Levi—who participated in the Free Market Study and the Antitrust Project, programs of crucial importance to the development of the Chicago School of Economics and Chicago Law and Economics—assumed the presidency of the University of Chicago. Initially, Stigler’s praise of Levi was extravagant. But Stigler quickly became disenchanted: … President Levi has read the trends of our times, and concludes that they are irresistible. What then can he do to preserve his beloved university? Since he cannot preserve it as a premier intellectual institution, he will minimize the travail in its accommodation to those forces which have brought down Columbia, Harvard, and in fact in some measure every premier university in our nation … The alternative view makes a different reckoning of prospects for one university, ours. A few universities can oppose the trends toward making the university a social welfare mission operated by a miniature democracy, on this view … The difficulty is that the Levi policy has never given this alternative a hearing. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 135

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the Chicago School/Columbia University Press story of how neoliberal economists read 1968 campus unrest — their distrust of universities as institutions that would cave to political pressure, which connects to their preference for extra-university think tanks.