A Big Announcement From Soros

Hedge fund manager and philanthropist George Soros will put $50 million into an "Institute of New Economic Thinking," dedicated to fighting what the Financial Times calls "unwavering belief in unchecked free markets, which remains pervasive in universities." The FT quotes Mr. Soros as saying in an interview: "The ideologists in the free markets are still in command and I think they'll be very difficult to remove because they have tenure." It's amazing how different people can look at the same universities and see different things; this morning, the Manhattan Institute publishes a piece asking, "How is the university, specifically the humanities and social sciences, with its rampant anti-Americanism, anti-intellectualism, muddle-brained identity politics, hostility to the unvarnished truth and all the rest to be re-conquered and restored to sanity?" The fact that Mr. Soros's board of advisers includes a bunch of academic economists and some prominent journalists suggests that the complaints from the right may be more grounded than are Mr. Soros's, but the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. In the FT interview, Mr. Soros likened free-market economics to Marxism: "a dogma whose time has passed." It's a system under which Mr. Soros has certainly prospered.