This school of thought certainly did satisfy corporate donors, but it was sharply at odds with the independent ideas the Virginia school was competing with in this era, when so many other scholars, moved by the hard questions raised by the civil rights movement, reached nearly opposite conclusions. Researchers in history and sociology, for example, including some emerging leaders in UVA’s own history department, such as the southern historian Paul M. Gaston, were reaching conclusions that, in effect, echoed the teachings of Martin Luther King and civil rights activists: that radical restructuring would be required to include all Americans in the promise of opportunity, and that for this, federal intervention was essential. It was needed for a simple reason, they showed: because only the federal government had the power to end the long train of damaging injustices shielded by undemocratic state governments.45
Not surprisingly, then, even at an institution as relatively culturally conservative as the University of Virginia, more people were looking askance at the project of the Thomas Jefferson Center. A member of the top administration murmured that, in effect, “there was nobody in the Department [of Economics] to the left of the John Birch Society.”46
In 1967, unnerved by their loss of stature and sensing that they were “being liquidated,” the founders of the center shifted its funds to a foundation beyond the university’s control. Then, for the third time in as many years, the senior economics faculty, led by Buchanan, again recommended that Gordon Tullock be promoted to full professor. That, too, could be read as brinkmanship. Tullock had never earned a Ph.D. and by his own admission had never completed an economics course. Brilliant though Buchanan and his allies might have believed the law school alumnus to be, he lacked training in the field in which he taught, and his publication record—apart from the book he had coauthored with Buchanan—was undistinguished. He was also an awful teacher. It did not help that Tullock struck many outside the center as an egomaniac—or just a twit. (Once, for example, as a new colleague was unpacking his books, Tullock appeared at the door. “Oh, Mr. Johnson, I’m glad you finally arrived,” he said. “I need the opinion of someone obviously inferior to me.”)47 Tullock would not be promoted. Buchanan was furious.
Trying to leverage his standing to avenge his own honor and his colleague’s name, Buchanan threatened to leave unless the president reversed himself and made Tullock a full professor. The president held firm. “I have deep and abiding loyalties to the South, Virginia, and the University,” Buchanan said upon resigning, but he could tolerate neither the “gross injustice” to Gordon Tullock nor “the long-smoldering internal campaign of slander, malicious gossip and vilification” directed at his program and his own running of it.48
So Buchanan left. He accepted a regular faculty position at the University of California at Los Angeles, “a fine” department and among the closest in spirit to Virginia’s and Chicago’s. Indeed, in subsidizing the free-market training of men from other countries, the libertarian Earhart Foundation treated the Chicago, Virginia, and UCLA economics departments as interchangeable options.49 It did not feel that way to Buchanan, though. On a visit to Los Angeles he revealed that he disliked the city and found the school “impersonal.” He went despondently, knowing that he would no longer be the big fish able to make an outsize splash in a small pond. He also seemed uncomfortable about the number of African Americans living in the city and attending UCLA, commenting to Tullock after a visit to San Diego State about how there were “very few blacks in evidence” and the students seemed “more orderly” than UCLA’s.50 Equally dispirited, Warren Nutter left UVA to serve as President Nixon’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.51 The program, the loyal alumnus James C. Miller III protested, had suffered “emasculation.”52
• • •
Over the ensuing decades, Buchanan and his colleagues would tell the tale of their center’s implosion as one of liberal perfidy—the politically motivated backstabbing of innocents. “Things at Virginia have fallen apart,” Jim Buchanan informed his former adviser, “due to [a] rotten and wholly dishonest administration.”53
Buchanan’s telling distorted the reality in at least two ways. The administration was not, in fact, liberal, let alone hostile to right-wing ideas. Its members were pragmatic conservatives; Buchanan’s men were zealous libertarians. And the administrators had realized that the difference mattered. They were practical men who wanted more investment by the state government in Virginia’s future. Shannon and his board understood that “to really serve the needs of the state”—a democratizing state, at that—the university could no longer operate as it had in the Byrd era, certainly not if it wanted to become a nationally reputable research institution. Among other things, it needed to attract not just African American men but women of all groups as well, a change Shannon urged in 1967 and saw to fruition in 1970.54
Buchanan also bore more than a little personal blame for his program’s fate. He had misgauged his market, one could say, from the time he jumped into the public debate in 1959 to urge wholesale privatization of the state’s schools. Colgate Darden had authorized their center to push back on the New Deal, yes, but not to side with the reactionaries who threatened the destruction of public education to save segregation. Public schools were a staple of civilized society, in his view, a view shared by the state’s top business leaders. The split only widened under Shannon as Buchanan’s conduct as a colleague hurt his cause. Just as he could see no exploitation in the market, so he saw as unremarkable his own taking advantage of his status to get what he wanted, regardless of the opinions of other colleagues who rightly assumed decisions should be made democratically. By his own reports, Buchanan ran his department as though he were the CEO of a private firm, answerable to no one. Where other departments made hires through collective deliberation, he chose those “who fit my requirements,” unconcerned that others might not be comfortable with his nonnegotiable choices.55
He never acknowledged any fault on his or his fellows’ part for their fall from grace. In his telling of his life story, the campus donnybrook took its place alongside the alleged discrimination he had suffered in the Navy, where he had felt the sting of Ivy League northerners’ snobbery about Middle Tennessee State Teachers College. He was the victim of mistreatment; he was sure of it. He ascribed the demise of his program to “crude attempts at thought control” by “establishment intellectuals,” men who bore “envy-engendered hatred” toward those who rejected their “romance with the state.”56 As Buchanan fled Charlottesville for Los Angeles, he found further grounds for his fury—and more reasons to constrict democracy.
CHAPTER 7
A WORLD GONE MAD
“I felt that I had landed in a lunatic asylum,” trapped in “a world gone mad,” James Buchanan would say of his time at UCLA. It was 1968–69, the most tumultuous school year in modern history, as the student revolt went global. That January, at the start of the second semester, two young Black Panther Party activists were assassinated by a member of a rival radical group only yards from the economics department, which itself had been the target, a few months earlier, of an anonymous failed bombing for its failure to hire any black faculty. The shooter’s group was enraged at having lost a vote over which tendency would have more influence on the Community Advisory Board of UCLA’s new Center for Afro-American Studies. The murders horrified student activists across the country and stupefied the campus.1
But in Jim Buchanan’s mind, the violence just reinforced why money obtained from taxpayers to fund public resources was leading society in a destructive direction. He drew a similar message from the reaction of UCLA students and faculty to the firing of Angela Davis.
To her advocates, Davis was a brilliant intellectual who was bringing fresh thinking to campus. The Alabama-born, Sorbonne-trained assistant professor of philosophy taught “the most widely attended [classes] in the history of the school.” To Buchanan and others on the right, she w
as simply a Black Panther Party supporter and a self-avowed Communist. Pushed by Governor Ronald Reagan to fire Davis for violating the university’s policy prohibiting Communist Party membership among the faculty, the administration did so, only to have faculty in every department but economics protest the firing as a violation of her First Amendment rights and the principle of academic freedom. Huge rallies demanded that she be rehired. The courts would eventually agree.2
Not Buchanan. He believed that, in the short term, repression was the only appropriate immediate answer to the spreading student unrest. Despite “my long-held libertarian principles,” he said, looking back, “I came down squarely on the ‘law-and-order’ side” of things. He heaped praise upon one administrator who showed the “simple courage” to smash the student rebellion on his campus with violent police action.3
But Buchanan’s experiences at UCLA left a far deeper legacy, one that ultimately explains why, in our time, governors and state legislators under the influence of the capitalist radical right have been moving aggressively to transform public higher education in states where they are in control. After 2010, as the Koch-funded project moved forward in the states, its representatives sought to slash their states’ public university budgets while simultaneously raising tuition, ending need-based scholarships, limiting or curtailing tenure protections, reducing faculty governance, and undermining support for the liberal arts curriculum (particularly those parts of it most known for dissent). In each case, Republican-appointed members of the university governing boards acted with unprecedented speed while at the same time limiting deliberations. At the University of Virginia, they fired a popular president for being an “incrementalist.” In Texas, they called themselves “the kick-ass regents.” In North Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, Iowa, and Wisconsin, they shoved out chancellors who would not do their bidding.4
It was in the crucible of the campus upheaval of the 1960s that Buchanan produced the analysis and prescription behind this determination to transform public universities into corporate-style entities. Setting to work on a new book with coauthor Nicos Devletoglou, a young UCLA visiting scholar who had witnessed the era’s upheaval at the London School of Economics, Buchanan contended that the leaders of higher education institutions were enabling “a handful of revolutionary terrorists to undo the heritage of centuries.”5
What made the authors’ case distinctive was not that anger—widespread on the broad right and among many older liberal faculty, too—but the totally original public choice argument for why the solution was not to deal with the young radicals on an ad hoc, one-case-at-a-time basis, but to rethink these institutions and their incentive structures. Government and the public, Buchanan and his coauthor would argue, had to stop considering colleges and universities as public resources. They constituted an industry, albeit “a unique industry,” in which individuals sought to maximize their personal advantage and minimize their costs.6
From that starting point it was easy to explain why state governments should no longer support low-tuition public universities. They provided yet another example of how too much money going from the taxpayers’ pockets—where it could actually do good—to government spending on questionable activities in the “public interest” wrought perverse results. Its ill-conceived inducements and lack of proper penalties for misconduct, they said, all but invited protests.
The problem with the university, according to Buchanan and Devletoglou, began with its distinctive structural features: “(1) those who consume its product [students] do not purchase it [at full-cost price]; (2) those who produce it [faculty] do not sell it; and (3) those who finance it [taxpayers] do not control it.”
Having obtained the university’s services for “free,” or close to it, the customer had little reason to value them—or the faculty, administrators, and facilities at his disposal. “Is it to be wondered that he treats the whole university setting with disrespect or even contempt?” asked the coauthors. Indeed, having little of his own money at stake, the student was in an ideal position to disrupt the university whenever he or she chose to do so, even to demand that changes be made to it, without paying any personal price. So, too, the faculty “producers” bore no personal cost for the disruption and damage: tenure insulated them. It was “one of the root causes of the chaos,” in fact, for job security meant that faculty members had no driving motivation to stand up to the radical students. They had more reason to be coconspirators, or at least passive observers of the upheaval.7
Finally, owing to a management structure that divorced investment and ownership from control, university administrators misunderstood who their true bosses were. They tended to be “prisoners of their faculty,” allowing faculty rather than shareholders to set policy (a situation as perverse to the authors as workers’ control in industry would be). Equally peculiar in the authors’ minds was that “taxpayers and alumni,” by which they presumably meant donating alumni, “unlike investing stockholders,” paid scant attention to “the results obtained by management,” even though their money sustained the institutions.8
The cure flowed from the diagnosis. Students should pay full-cost prices, and universities should compete for them as customers. Taxpayers and donors should organize “as other stockholders do” to monitor their investments. “Weak control” by governing boards must end. As agents of the taxpayers (in the case of California, those who had elected Governor Reagan), the boards should enforce order in the enterprise—for example, by adopting “a policy stating that all students arrested in campus demonstrations should be summarily expelled.”9
Only measures modeled on corporate understandings of responsibility and order would work. Indeed, in the end, the problem was public ownership itself, which left no one clearly in charge and no one with the kind of direct personal incentives for maintenance that came from strictly defined property rights. “Think how much differently,” the coauthors nudged, faculty and administrators would react to student occupations of their offices if those offices were more like their own homes: if “they should be required to rent, lease, or purchase office facilities from the universities.” Then they might find their spines and stop paying “ransom.”10
It is hard to read this manifesto and not see the blueprint for the right’s current fight to radically transform public higher education: to turn state universities into dissent-free suppliers of trained labor, run with firm managerial hands and with little or no input from faculty, and at the lowest possible cost to taxpayers. In essence, Buchanan and Devletoglou were arguing that if you stop making college free and charge a hefty tuition, ideally enough to cover the entire cost of each education, you ensure that students will have a strong economic incentive to focus on their studies and nothing else—certainly not on trying to alter the university or the wider society. But the authors were also arguing for something else: educating far fewer Americans, particularly lower-income Americans who could not afford full-cost tuition. And they were telling the businesspeople who tended to dominate governing boards that it was time to get tough with their wards, faculty and students alike.
Within a few months the economists had a book manuscript completed. In Buchanan’s telling, its content proved “utter poison to a certain type of academic liberal.” Whatever the reasons, publishing house after publishing house turned them down. That is, until they met Irving Kristol, an editor at Basic Books who was then attracting attention as a spokesman for neoconservatism, an emerging tendency that backed core New Deal programs but called for a crackdown on campus radicalism, an end to race-based affirmative action, and a more hard-line anti-Communist foreign policy. Basic Books pledged to get the book out within the year.11
Academia in Anarchy was dedicated to “The Taxpayer.” To those familiar with the Virginia school voucher fight, however, the book’s racial undertones came through despite its ostensibly race-neutral economic arguments. Indeed, when talking about campus unrest caused by black students, w
hich they depicted as the core of “the chaos,” the authors implied that the unrest was being orchestrated by external revolutionaries, presumably white Communists, who engaged in “usage of black students” for their own ends—as though African American students had no cause to protest and no ability to lead their own fight. “The revolutionary adopts the black students as his most attractive allies,” wrote the economists; inciting them to achieve his own radical ends, he exploits white Americans’ “guilt complex.” The authors maintained that the “reaction would have been total, swift, and severe” if the protesters had been “supporters of George Wallace instead of the Black Student Union or the Students for a Democratic Society.” (It would have come as quite a surprise to young African Americans to hear that police showed special leniency toward them.)12
In his review of the book in National Review, Buchanan’s former colleague William Breit seconded the call for a “system of full tuition charges supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income.”13 The point was not merely parsimony to save taxpayer money. Privately, Gordon Tullock and Jim Buchanan discussed the social control function of denying a liberal arts education to young people from lower-income families who had not saved to pay for it. “We may be producing a positively dangerous class situation,” Tullock said, by educating so many working-class youth who would probably not make it into management but might make trouble, having had their sights raised.14
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