Wednesday, October 08, 2008

More "Genius" at the University of Illinois

The ban on political demonstrations of any kind has been completely lifted. While I support that, I also recognize that it will be a boon only to lefties.

So will keeping a "capitalism academy" off the campus:

Also Monday, the university’s flagship campus, at Urbana-Champaign, announced that it was calling off negotiations to create a research and education center that many professors feared would amount to a program with a single point of view and without regular academic oversight...

The other controversy at Illinois that was resolved Monday involved the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government, which was set up with funds from alumni with the goal of promoting the study of free markets and principles of Western civilization — and which will now operate but not as part of the university.

In recent years, alumni of a number of colleges and universities have donated funds to colleges to endow programs to promote the study of American institutions or capitalism or other parts of society that the alumni feel deserve more attention on campus. At institutions such as Princeton University, such programs have won support both within and outside the academy, but in other cases, disputes have broken out over whether these centers were seeking more autonomy than is appropriate. And that was the case at Illinois.

We wouldn't want the university to be associated with anything like free markets, capitalism, or Western civilization, would we?

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