Viner refused AJC membership to preserve his perceived academic objectivity

Evidence

Jacob Viner was not troubled by the concerns about the nature of rhetoric that had led Knight to avoid public engagement. He was intensely protective of his mantle of academic objectivity, however, and anxious to honor the expectation of disinterestedness that he ascribed to the institutions that employed him. These goals led him, like Knight, to maintain a wary stance toward organizations that were formed to pursue a po liti cal goal. His continued refusal to accept the offer of membership in the American Jewish Committee in the midst of World War II, despite his Jewish heritage and the increasingly pressing nature of its cause, demonstrates the seriousness of his reservations. There was no element of the committee’s program, he acknowledged, to which he “could not heartily subscribe.” Nevertheless, his usefulness “would be seriously diminished” if he accepted any commitments beyond his “wholly objective work as an economist.” — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 129

Categorization

• SHARE: A Chicago economist during the Holocaust declining even the American Jewish Committee to protect his scholarly neutrality is a striking detail for someone studying the institutional sociology of academic objectivity.
• XREF: connects to: Viner rejected Simons as an ally because he saw ideology as violating academic objectivity. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 113; Stigler rejected collegiate self-governance as a safeguard of academic freedom — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 138

Broader Connections

• Stigler rejected collegiate self-governance as a safeguard of academic freedom #complicates (0.72) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 138