INTRODUCING MYSELF

I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to Liberty and Power, for while I have posted to online forums and left a few comments on other people's blogs, I’ve yet to establish one of my own. I am an academic psychologist. A quick description of my research interests would be that I do theoretical psychology, with a developmental bias; I am also becoming gradually more interested in the history of psychology. My hobby is music history (jazz and R&B, in particular).

Though I've been a libertarian for a long time, which of course means that I harbor too many opinions on too many subjects, I don't claim any special insight into most of them. What I propose to concentrate on is academic life. Universities are, to a large extent, non-market institutions--even in the United States, where they are less insulated from market forces than is usually the case elsewhere. What's more, their non-market status is nearly always taken for granted: by insiders and outsiders, by supporters and critics alike. I believe that understanding how universities work will enable us to understand why they often exert such illiberal influences on society at large, and put us in a better position to evaluate proposals for transforming them. In fact, universities are now under multiple pressures that come close to guaranteeing that they won't keep functioning as they did in the past. So I hope to add to the informed critiques of academia that David Beito and R. Reid McKee, in particular, have been contributing to this blog.