The University of Chicago is gearing up to launch a $200 million economics research center, to be known as the Milton Friedman Institute. Building on the university's historical ties to one of the most important economists of the twentieth century, Chicago anticipates that the Institute will "build on the University's existing leadership position and make the Milton Friedman Institute a primary intellectual destination for economics by creating a robust forum for engagement of our faculty and students with scholars and policymakers from around the world" (those are the words of Chicago president Robert Zimmer).

It's a no brainer. It's a great idea, and it's bound to be successful. So of course there's a noisy group of faculty who are against it:

Few names are more associated with the University of Chicago than Milton Friedman's.

But that's exactly the problem, say some faculty who want to put the brakes on a plan to name a new research center after the Nobel Prize-winning economist.

In a letter to U. of C. President Robert Zimmer, 101 professors--about 8 percent of the university's full-time faculty--said they feared that having a center named after the conservative, free-market economist could "reinforce among the public a perception that the university's faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity."

About a half-dozen faculty members aired their concerns Tuesday in a meeting with Zimmer and Provost Thomas Rosenbaum, who remain committed to the project. Rosenbaum said the university plans to put about $500,000 toward launching the center next year, but it hopes the expected $200 million endowment for the center will come mostly from private funds from alumni and business leaders.

"It is a right-wing think tank being put in place," said Bruce Lincoln, a professor of the history of religions and one of the faculty members who met with the administration Tuesday. "The long-term consequences will be very severe. This will be a flagship entity and it will attract a lot of money and a lot of attention, and I think work at the university and the university's reputation will take a serious rightward turn to the detriment of all."

The controversy highlights tensions between the university's historically conservative economics department and law school and the generally liberal humanities and social sciences.

It also renews a split on campus about Friedman himself, who brought prestige to the university through his economic approach, which became known worldwide as the "Chicago School" of economics, but also garnered ill will from those who thought his policies led to social injustice and inequality.

The Milton Friedman Institute, proposed by faculty members who included three Nobel Prize winners in economics, is intended to attract visiting scholars who will conduct research on topics related to economics, business and law. It will promote workshops, seminars and lectures.

The institute will be centrally located in buildings that now house the Chicago Theological Seminary, which is moving to a new location.

Rosenbaum said the center will not push any particular point of view.

"We are honoring a great scholar, and that is the intent here," Rosenbaum said. "We are supportive of a wide range of ideas across the spectrum of ideologies, and it's not intended to promote any ideology."

But faculty critics are concerned that it will be one-sided, attracting scholars and donors who share a point of view.

They point to sentences in the institute proposal noting that its focus would "typify some of Milton Friedman's most interesting academic work," including his critical analysis of monetary policy and advocacy of market-driven forces over government planning of the economy.

"I don't think any institute of any educational institution should be so strongly aligned behind a single ideological program," said U. of C. music professor and department chair Robert Kendrick.

Friedman won the Nobel Prize in 1976, a year before he retired from the U. of C. after 30 years of teaching. He died in 2006.

"For many people who travel around the word, the university has had a pretty bad reputation that is tied to the Chicago School and economic principles that Milton Friedman advocated," said Yali Amit, a U. of C. statistics and computer science professor. "We don't think it's a great idea to strengthen this reputation."

Economics professor Lars Peter Hansen, chair of the committee that proposed the institute, said the opponents are confusing Friedman's economic scholarship with his social and political views. He said the center will not have any "particular political slant."

John Cochrane, a business school professor who served on the Friedman Institute committee, also emphasized that the center will be nonpartisan.

"There will be no ties to any party," he said. "It will not be a home for administration officials while Republicans wait out the [ Barack] Obama administration."

Columbia University economics professor Jagdish Bhagwati laughed when he heard about the latest debate at the Hyde Park campus.

"It is nonsensical to object. . . . Chicago should be proud it has someone like Milton on its rolls," he said. "Anybody who can claim that Milton was not one of the major thinkers of his time is crazy."

The University is explicit and clear that the Milton Friedman Institute will welcome and host a range of viewpoints. And Friedman himself was hardly pigeon-holeable--as a libertarian, he believed in free markets, but he also helped end the draft and advocated the decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. But these things are lost on the faculty protesters, with their blunt-instrument descriptors (they use "right-wing" as a discrediting, dismissive label--despite the fact that it just doesn't fit). All of which is to say that they don't see the University as a center for the open, unfettered pursuit of knowledge, and they do see the University as a political entity whose ideological image must be managed in accordance with their own politics--even when that means attempting to suppress scholarly endeavors that they themselves acknowledge are likely to be successful.

The result is a major act of intellectual bad faith on the part of the protesters. They dare to argue that the Institute will harm intellectual diversity on campus, when the Institute is committed to open inquiry across viewpoints, and when the protesters are the ones trying to suppress a scholarly undertaking because they don't like--even prospectively, in anticipation--the ideas that the undertaking may enable to be explored. And in casting the Institute as an "ideological" endeavor and then objecting to it high-mindedly on those grounds, the protesting faculty also has the temerity to imply that there are not already plenty of campus entities that openly embrace ideological agendas--as long as those entities (women's studies, peace studies, etc.) are aligned with the faculty's views, they get a free pass.

But we should perhaps be a bit forgiving. The Chicago faculty is, after all, not alone in having a conniption fit about a scholarly center that may include viewpoints they abhor--Hamilton College has gone down that self-discrediting road recently, as have SMU and the University of Illinois. There is a bit of an emerging, censorious bandwagon here--and Chicago's faculty protesters are simply jumping on it.

The good news is that the faculty members who object to undertakings such as the Alexander Hamilton Institute have not been very successful in shutting them down. Chicago can and should forge ahead with the Milton Friedman Institute.