Jim Lindgren recalls how Ronald Coase was made unwelcome at the University of Virginia because faculty and administration members saw him as a right-wing extremist. James Buchanan was treated similarly..
In the 1960s, just AFTER Ronald Coase had done his Nobel Prize winning work in law & economics and AFTER James Buchanan had done his Nobel Prize winning work in public choice, a concerted effort was made by members of their department and the administration at the University of Virginia to drive them out of Virginia.
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Since Coase and Buchanan had tenure, they couldn't be fired, but Virginia decided not to make an attractive offer to keep Coase when Chicago offered him a job, though Coase has said that he might well have stayed had they done so. Buchanan was driven out in part by not tenuring his junior colleagues. That this was done a few years after Coase and Buchanan had done their best work is just stunning. Virginia began the 1960s as the most innovative and creative among the world's great economics departments and ended the 1960s as just another pretty good department, no better or worse than a couple dozen other departments in the country.
Coase has had more impact on me than perhaps any other twentieth century thinker, save Ludwig von Mises. His treatment at U. of Va. came close on the heels of McCarthyism, indicating that certain people didn't learn the lesson.
I should point out Coase didn't win the Nobel Prize until 1991. (There was no Nobel Prize in economics until 1969.) Seems his detractors didn't appreciate his intellect at the time. I wonder how they reacted when he won the Prize, decades later?
