MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

Campus Reform lodges a complaint.  "Marxist ideologies found in University of Utah's economics department."  That prompts Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds to quip, "Leaves found on trees."

Here's how Campus Reform's Austin Brown reports.

The University of Utah’s Department of Economics claims to prepare students for a wide variety of economics-related careers, yet it appears to place an emphasis on promoting left-wing political ideologies.

The department has gained a reputation over the years for the amount of time dedicated to teaching students about Marxism. An article published in 2018 in The Daily Utah Chronicle stated that it “has been labeled a center of Marxist thought” and that its “Marxist characterization has been documented by numerous publications.”

One doctoral student told the Chronicle that nearly everything in the department is “built on Marxism.”

In defense of its economics curriculum, the school asserts that it “offers students an exposure to an unusual breadth of economic thought, as is reflected in elective offerings that examine feminist, historical, and institutional approaches.”

It might be, as Mr Brown suggests, that the course content of “Political Economy of Race, Class, & Gender” or “The United States of Inequality: Political and Economic Remedies and Challenges” can be taught from a perspective of tight priors in which whatever inequalities or disparate outcomes exist are the consequences of an entrenched Ruling Class deploying its powers to keep the Oppressed oppressed.  They do not necessarily have to be taught that way: the challenge is to establish whether a student could ask whether sex roles or labor market outcomes or the amassing of fortunes is in part emergent.

That Utah Chronicle article is not the bill of particulars Mr Brown would have you believe it is.

The University of Utah’s economics department has been labeled a center of Marxist thought since it began its leftward trajectory following a move toward academic freedom in the early 20th century. State institutions, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, loosened their grip on the school after one-third of the faculty resigned. This mass resignation was in response to Joseph Kingsbury, former president of the U, recommending the dismissal of five faculty members following a speech critical of former Gov. William Spry.

Over the years, the department’s Marxist characterization has been documented by numerous publications, including City Weekly. In an op-ed for the Deseret News, Norman Waitzman, the department chair, criticized this label.

“The hallmark of the department is its commitment to competing perspectives and their evolution (i.e., a pluralistic perspective) and as such exposes students to a range of theoretical perspectives, including Marx,” Waitzman wrote.

The department’s reputation comes primarily from the work of three professors — Emery Kay Hunt, Hans Ehrbar and Al Campbell — who are now retired. Many believe the legacy of their work continues to influence the department.

“Almost everything [in the economics department at the U] is built on Marxism,” said Luciano Pesci, a doctorate student in economics at the U. “Though there is a pluralistic approach to teaching in the department, Marx is a big component. It’s behind the gender, labor and environmental economics. We studied it at least a little bit in almost every class.”

The department's employment of scholars working from heterodox and institutional perspectives goes back over fifty years.  If one wants to be puckish, one can note that the "range of theoretical perspectives" means offering students, particularly graduate students, a break from the heavy dose of convex analysis that passes for High Theory in economics, possibly to the discipline's disadvantage.

Adding to the piquancy of the story: the economics faculty might have pivoted further to the heterodox and institutionalist perspectives as a way of exercising countervailing power.

Some have pointed to the department’s status as a supposed Marxist hub as the reason for a 2017 donation from the Charles Koch Foundation to create an economics institute in the business school.

The Koch brothers own a variety of companies, including some in oil, fertilizer, mineral refining, glass and cattle. According to Forbes, the family was worth $82 billion in 2016. The most politically active members of the Koch family, Charles and David, fund numerous conservative and libertarian organizations and candidates. In 1980, David Koch was the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential nominee. On its website, the Koch Foundation says it works to “help people improve their lives by advancing an understanding of the benefits of free societies.”

Following the donation, more than 100 students, faculty and staff led by political science professor Mark Button signed a letter requesting safeguards be put in place to keep the foundation from threatening the U’s academic freedom.

“The purpose of this letter is to explain why a funding agreement between the Koch Foundation and the University of Utah raises serious concerns about the principles and practice of intellectual independence and academic freedom at the University of Utah,” the petition read.

The grant is subject to evaluation annually for eight years, leading some to believe the U will be pressured to comply with the desires of the donors.

After the Deseret News endorsed the donation in an editorial calling the department one of the “last bastions of Marxist thought in North America,” Waitzman reacted by praising the donation and refuting the label.

Wisely so.  It doesn't matter whether it's a Koch Foundation grant or a Ford Foundation Grant or a National Science Foundation grant, it comes with strings attached.  Should the ostensibly market-favorable Koch funded scholars venture arguments to strengthen or be strengthened in contention with the heterodox economists, who might have useful ideas about free societies, it's all the better for Utah's students.

I note that the non-political Koch brother has not been funding university sailing programs at Utah or anywhere else.  Celebrities are another matter.