Readers of this site probably know about my ordeal at my university, which has been covered quite extensively on this site and by the major mainstream press. Now that major combat operations have ended (to employ a phrase used by Bush in reference to Iraq…two years ago), I’ve had some time to reflect on what happened, why, and whether and to what extent I responded properly.
And so here are my thoughts on this incident that took my career as a professor of economics in a direction I would never had anticipated. Now that the case is more-or-less settled, I no longer feel bound by legal considerations to keep silent on important details. This article is the first to disclose the full details of the case.
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Thank you for sharing your story.
I’m really proud of you for not giving up and not shying away from the tactics of PC crazies.
Keep up the great work!
Thanks for providing a detailed overview of the insanity at the UNLV. Really, quite disturbing.
I really was struck by the optimism in this article. Despite the failure of UNLV to create restitution for the undue burden they placed on Dr. Hoppe, He seems ready to continue his scholarly work. Good to have him back.
In the tradition of Mises and Rothbard (and Hayek and others for that matter) you stood up for what you believed to be true, at considerable personal and professional cost. Mises, in particular, literally risked his life in an attempt to return some degree of economic and social rationality to Europe between the two World Wars. Thanks so much for following their example, and for the show of courage.
The influence of Keynes’s childlessness on his time preferences and influence of his time preferences in turn on his policy prescriptions has long fascinated me. Of course, policy prescriptions so influenced accord very nicely with the effects of electoral terms and term limits on the policy preferences of political incumbents, so between democracy and homosexuality, we’ve got a real witches’ brew of policy here, as the economic record of the Keynesian interlude bears out.
While I’ve read Democracy the God That Failed, and recommend it, I haven’t read any scholarship concerning Keynes’s time preferences. But I assume there’s already a lot in existence, and more coming. His famous “In the long run . . .” remark NEVER fails to bring all this to my mind.
No, Lord Alfred, we are NOT all dead in the long run. YOU, however, ARE thoroughly dead, while some of the rest of us continue on, far past any future you ever cared about.
Thank you for “teaching” your students by your example. You may have given them the most important piece of learning that they take away from UNLV,
Mr. Potts: Interesting observation concerning Keynes (whom I believe never married) and his childlessness, and his views concerning time preference. I do not think that Keynes considered time preference as having any influence on the determination of interest rates. On the other side of this topic are Mises and Rothbard, two of the staunchest supporters of time preference, both of whom did not have children even though they were married, although I believe Mises did not marry until his mid-50s. I really do not know much about Frank Fetter personally, except that he was born in Indiana. You and others may find that articles written by Rothbard and Professor Salerno regarding Keynes and Millenialism may help to illuminate what influenced Keynes the man and the economist.
To me, the 2 most important lessons were outlined by the good Professor:
1. Stating that the average member of a group (a statistical issue, factually provable) does something does not mean that any specific person does something (a subjective conclusion about that person, assuming no other knowledge of them).
2. The idea that influences are not causes. Influences can lead to weighted distributions (like liberals vs conservatives in academia, or women vs men in CEO positions) but do not necessarily mean that anyone is being forced/disallowed from doing something. Someone may be influenced by their circumstances without it guiding their decision (or absolving them of their responsibility for it).
Actually, Keynes was married.
Mikey, Thanks for the correction. I’m curious, did Keynes remain married his entire life or was he divorced?
Keynes was a homosexual for much of his life, he later married a ballerina.
http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/keynes_jm.html
“At the university, however, tolerance is selective. You may assert that white heterosexual males are responsible for all of mankind’s misery, that Castro’s Cuba is a great success story, that capitalism means exploitation, or that most university professors are liberals because conservatives are too stupid to teach. If anyone should complain about this, such complaint will be dismissed outright.
None of this applies to professors who dissent from socialist, statist, or culturally left-wing views, however, as I would find out.”
This, to me, is the real lesson of Mr. Hoppe’s ordeal. Tolerance really only flows towards those ideas that the Academic Bolsheviks are already inclined to believe.
Even though the UNLV administration turned a blind eye to their own academic freedom policy (which is a Bad Thing), your resort to blunt ad hominem remarks of the above-quoted sort amounts to an abuse of academic freedom. I seriously doubt that anyone of those praising your “victory” would accept with perfect tolerance a remark on the usefulness of keeping in mind, say, Murray Rothbard’s Jewish origin when considering his theoretical contributions.
Dmitri:
In order for Professor Hoppe’s remark to be considered “ad hominem”, and to be dismissed for this reason, the validity of his conclusion must rest upon a verbal attack against a person or people. Obviously this is not the case. It is simple to abstract basic premises from this statement and to understand how they support the conclusion. What you call “ad hominem” is merely coloration added to a mid-range article (one that applies theory to a specific case). In writing the article, I am sure Professor Hoppe considered the audience he was writing for.
One more minor gripe: you attempted to make an analogy between Rothbard’s Jewish origin (which has little-to-no bearing on his theoretical positions) and Hoppe’s persecutors’ ideological position (which bears directly on the situation at hand). I’m sure you see the problem here.
I must have been vague in my previous comment. It was only Hoppe’s original remark on Keynes’ sexual orientation as something to be kept in mind when discussing Keynesian theory that I perceived as an obvious ad hominem remark, not his subsequent opinions on the “commissar” and other bureaucrats from the UNLV. After all, I don’t approve of the prosecutors’ conduct, nor am I going to defend them.
I just think that Keynes’ sexual orientation had no more bearing on Keynes’ theoretical positions than Rothbard’s Jewish origin on Rothbard’s. Moreover, I think that under whatever degree of academic freedom it is absolutely necessary to keep the theory under scrutiny — even a theory of one’s worst opponent — apart from the personal characteristics of its supporters, be it sexual orientation, ethnic origin or whatever else.
Dmitri:
Thank you for the clarification. However, I still do not recoginze Hoppe’s statement as ad hominem:
“I also noted–as have many other scholars–that J.M Keynes, whose economic theories were the subject of some upcoming lectures, had been a homosexual and that this might be useful to know when considering his short-run economic policy recommendation and his famous dictum ‘in the long run we are all dead.’”
His intent here is not to discredit Keynes by calling him a homosexual, but to question whether his sexual orientation influenced his emphasis on the short-run. Though I find little merit in this particular point, it is not a fallacy.
Our compatriot Hans-Hermann Hoppe has received a great deal of support in libertarian media during his fight for academic freedom at the University of Nevada. But I have not noticed anyone expressing the opinion that should be held by thoroughgoing libertarians: privatize the university.
Academic freedom is not even a libertarian issue. Of course we care about academic freedom because professors like it — and professors make up the heart of our circles. But academic freedom has nothing to do with coercion. It is coercion and our insistent perception of it which separates libertarians from statists, not academic freedom.
Libertarians should not enter into fights about how the state should manage the assets it has usurped, or so I argue. It seems to me that one who enters that public debate shows by his choice of actions that he trusts the majority-rule process more than he trusts the market process.
If we say anything to our statist neighbors about this issue of academic freedom, we should say that this wrangling over who will pay which academicians to say what things is a tragedy of the commons. Such tragedies always happen when the government takes over management of some institution. The solution is to privatize. Sell the common.
If you follow my reasoning, and sympathize, you may go on to ask why I am trying to influence the opinions of other libertarians. Don’t I trust markets? Good question.
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