Guerrilla Teaching

0:00Okay, good afternoon. It's a great pleasure to be here as always, although I don't like being the last person between you and Lew Rockwell. When the schedule first came out, I was looking at it and I complained to my wife that I had to speak right before Lew and she pointed out, well, it could be worse. You could be the person who has to follow Lew. I think she certainly has a good point. As you know, our goal at the Mises Institute is to bring about a truly free society, a society devoted to liberty, to the free market, to peace. Now, there are other organizations that share some of these goals, promoting free market economic policy, for instance.

0:48Nonetheless, the Mises Institute is unique in at least two ways. The first is that we're hardcore. Following Mises and Rothbard, we're intransigent, we're uncompromising, single-minded, we're not warm and fuzzy. Well, Professor Hoppe, perhaps, but not the rest of us. What Milton Friedman famously said of Mises, namely that Mises was, quote, intolerant, Friedman and others would surely say of us at the Mises Institute as well. And I mean, yeah, that's right, we're intolerant of error, falsehood, foolishness, compromise, etc. Second thing that makes the Institute unique is that we employ a different strategy for many of these other organizations. There There are free market think tanks in Washington D.C. for instance, that produce hundreds of policy reports, analyses of particular regulations and so on.

2:01Their primary goal, the primary goal of those organizations is to influence the elites, government officials, politically corrected businessmen, status intellectuals and so on. These free market Fabians believe that they can gradually push the elites in a direction of more liberty. Now of course at the Mises Institute we also analyze current policies, academic fads and fashions and the like, but our primary objective is not to persuade the elites. As Rothbard pointed out in his seminal works on strategy, the Fabian approach simply cannot The Fabians were the 19th century British socialists who believed they could bring about a socialist society in Britain, not through a violent revolution or overthrow of the government, but rather gradually, step by step, by gaining positions of influence, access to important decision makers, and then gradually nudging them bit by bit in the direction of socialism.

3:12Well, it worked for the Fabians. But as Rothbard pointed out, that same strategy cannot work for libertarians or for classical liberals. And the reason is quite simple. It's because in the Fabian case, the Fabians were pushing the elites in a direction in which they already wanted to go. Right? More power for themselves, less liberty for the rest of us. It's a completely different matter to try to persuade those who hold political power to give it up to make the rest of us better off. I was reminded of this distinction when I was recently reading some interesting dialogue on the personal website of an individual with a large Washington, D.C. free market think tank, where there was sort of a wide open discussion of different approaches to promoting liberty and the complaints about how some organizations like the Mises Institute try to do it.

4:08And this individual said, well, you know, some groups are out there, you know, meeting amongst themselves and preaching to the choir and doing all this far out stuff on the fringes. Well, that doesn't do any good. That doesn't have any, they don't have any influence. He said, well, we talk to the people who really matter. He said, for example, I was recently in Russia with a group of classical liberals at a conference and we were granted an audience with Vladimir Putin. We have to influence Putin's policies. And I thought to myself, to quote the Dr. Evil character in Austin Powers, Right. I'm thinking, yeah, that's all Russia needs. If we could just get Putin a subscription to the Freeman, everything in Russia will be fine.

5:04Of course, that ignores the basic problem that Vladimir Putin has no desire to institute the free market in Russia. It would not be in his interest to bring about the kinds of reforms that we would all support. So at the Institute, our primary goal, our long-range purpose, is not to convert the elites, but rather to educate both those who are experienced students of liberty and those who are new to the movement. We're primarily, of course, a research and educational organization, not a policy think tank. We promote the Austrian School of Economics in the tradition of Mises and Rothbard. Now keeping with the title of my talk, Guerrilla Teaching, we recognize that change is not likely to come from the top down by taking over the economics departments of all the Ivy League schools and imposing Austrian economics on the world, but rather change is likely to come from the bottom up through a small but dedicated, hardcore cadre of intellectual activists for liberty.

6:08Let me just elaborate for a moment on this concept of the hardcore, which was very important for Rothbard. He defined the hardcore as full-time professional intellectuals, scholars, teachers, writers, and so on, who develop and advance the basic doctrine of the movement. In a 1962 memo to F. A. Harper, Baldy Harper, the founder of the Institute for Humane Studies, Rothbard pointed out, quote, the hardcore is the soul and wellspring of every intellectual or spiritual revolution in society, whether it be Christianity or the Enlightenment or French liberalism or Marxism. Rothbard continued, the advancement of any idea or set of ideas and specifically the great system of libertarian or classical liberal ideas can only come about by 1. research in the development of the system of ideas by the hardcore, and 2. education, education of the various strata of society, specifically, A. Advancement in the knowledge and depth of understanding of the problem by the various members of the hardcore themselves.

7:18B. Advancement further along in a libertarian direction of fellow travelers and of the previously uninterested. C. The recruitment into the hardcore of people who have advanced this far along the path of libertarian understanding. Well, our mission at the Institute, of course, includes both of these basic elements, research and education. How do we attempt to achieve our objectives? Well, there are at least two channels. One is we attempt to achieve these objectives directly through our own conferences, professional conferences and our teaching conferences, the most important of which being the Mises University, of course. But second, we also try to do research and educate indirectly by training and supporting current and future researchers and teachers from everything from professors at major research universities to instructors at community colleges and even high schools.

8:20And let me speak for just a moment about these teaching conferences. Conferences are extremely important for the educational mission and I'll mention two. One is the Austrian Scholars Conference, which is an academic conference designed to educate hardcore scholars about each other's work, to influence sympathetic fellow travelers and ultimately to recruit new scholars into the hardcore, going back to Rothbard's strategy. The second conference is the Mises University. This is an educational conference designed to Essentially, to do the same thing for top graduate and undergraduate students, namely to educate those who are already converted, so to speak, to our way of thinking, to expose them to the full set of libertarian ideas across a variety of disciplines, also to influence sympathetic fellow travelers among students, and third, to recruit the best and brightest of the next generation into our movement.

9:17What we now call the Mises University began back in 1986 with a three-day instructional conference titled Introduction to Austrian Economics. The faculty were Lew Rockwell, Roger Garrison, and four graduate students at Auburn University. There were about 30 students attending. The next year the conference was expanded to a week-long affair covering all the major and the major aspects of Austrian theory and policy and was moved to Stanford University, the campus of Stanford, in the summertime, just down the road. In 1987 and 88, the conference at Stanford was small and targeted toward advanced graduate students. In 1989, it was expanded dramatically and renamed the Mises University.

10:07There were classes for undergraduates and graduate students with individualized schedules, In other words, concurrent classes for over 100 students and the faculty grew from 4 to 12. After a couple of years at Claremont McKenna College in 1993 and 1994, the conference was moved to Auburn University or to Auburn, Alabama where it has remained ever since. And since 2001, the conference has been held on the campus of the Mises Institute at the Mises building. This last year's conference, there were two this past year in 2004. Each one featured about 12 speakers and over the course of the two conferences we had about 200 students attend.

10:52There were 61 plenary lectures, small lectures, panel discussions and seminars at each week-long conference. Now, because the Institute is committed to Rothbard's vision of a unified interdisciplinary science of liberty, the Mises University focuses not only on economics, but also on history, philosophy, political science, and even literature, journalism, and career strategy. What do students think of the Mises University? Well, I collected some quotations from students that students have included on their end of the conference evaluation forms that they turn in. And I'll just quote a few of them for you.

11:38Students have called it, quote, an incredible experience, an intellectual adventure, and a mind-opening event. The most incredible, stimulating and exciting intellectual experience I've ever had. A semester's worth of education in a week. A lot of students make a comment like that. Worth more than all my other educational experiences combined. A fantastic opportunity, these are verbatim quotes here, a fantastic opportunity for students who can otherwise become discouraged all through school. Here you have a chance to hear lectures by people whose books and articles you read all the time on Mises.org and elsewhere. You develop great camaraderie with people like you, something hard to come by in school.

12:25This alludes to a point that Walter Block made this morning about isolation, about libertarian students and scholars often being a minority of one at their own schools. It is what you always wanted college to be, an intellectual pursuit in which every day is filled with challenging ideas and good friends. Another student commented, I wish my university studies year-round could be like this. Let me give you some reflections collected from another former student at the Mises University whom I know very well, namely me. I first attended the Mises University in 1988, and it remains one of the most important intellectual experiences of my life.

13:15Before 1988, I had never met an Austrian economist, nor anyone remotely interested in Austrian economics. I had been an economics major in college, but only one of my professors, who was sort of a quasi-Marxist, had ever heard of the Austrian School. Now, sometime during my senior year of college, I happened to see a flyer on a campus bulletin board advertising scholarships from the Mises Institute. And I had an experience like the one Jeff just described, you know, walking by the brass plaque, thought, someone named an Institute after him? Wow, that's amazing. So I quickly got in touch with the folks at the Institute, was able to come out to California that summer for Mises University The conference itself was exhilarating. I got to meet Murray Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, Roger Garrison, David Gordon, a couple of dozen bright students. I still have my notes, by the way, from the first Mises University that I attended. I wish I had remembered to bring them with me to show you.

14:31There are 44 single-spaced pages, and I still refer back to them quite often. I was completely and utterly mesmerized, not only by the content of the lectures and discussions, which were great, but by the mere fact of being surrounded by a bunch of hardcore Austrians, some of whom I found out were even more hardcore than me. I quoted Rothbard earlier to the effect that it's just as important to protect and develop the hardcore itself as it is to recruit new members into the movement. And I think I speak for all of the faculty who have the privilege of teaching at the Mises University. And when I say that, I think we get more out of it every year than the students do.

15:16OK. Now, besides the conferences that the Mises Institute runs, The Institute, particularly through Mises.org, also supports college and high school teachers around the world. In my own classes at the University of Missouri, I rely heavily on Mises Institute books and materials. Many of the lectures, many of my class lectures, lectures are patterned after or modeled after lectures that I heard once many years ago at a Mises conference. In preparation for this talk, I sent an email to our Mises faculty listserv asking my colleagues to comment on how they use Mises Institute materials in their own teaching, how the Mises Institute has affected their careers as educators, and I got some amazing responses.

16:07Just briefly to summarize a few of those, many professors around the country and around The World Use Materials from Mises.org in the classroom. One colleague said, quote, the books and articles available at Mises.org are invaluable to my teaching. Rarely do I teach a class that I did not incorporate one of the daily articles as a discussion piece illustrating some economic principle we've just gone over with contemporary events. The daily articles, quote, from another professor, always have real-world applications that can be used in my principal's classes. They're easy and enjoyable for the students to read, and I think a lot of that is due to Jeff Tucker's skilled editing. One professor said, I often feel like a single voice crying in the wilderness, but with these articles and books available on the web, I'm no longer alone in this regard.

17:02Professors use Mises Institute books as textbooks, link sections or entire texts from course We encourage our best students to attend the Mises University, where they can be exposed to many of these things first-hand. Many professors use this faculty listserv that I mentioned as a way to get advice, feedback, to discuss strategy with other professors. Many of us get great teaching tips from watching the other professors at the Mises University and other conferences. I was very touched by hearing from one professor at a small community college who said that, essentially, he said without Mises.org, he would not be employed in his current job. There's no way he could perform his job without it.

18:01He said, quote, the Mises Institute has truly been a lifesaver and in this regard in two ways. He said, without a graduate degree in economics proper, I've basically learned my economics, anything that I know beyond the basics, from people like you at the Mises Institute. And as this gentleman pointed out to me, there are a lot of community colleges, technical colleges, staffed by faculty who don't have a formal advanced training in economics, who don't have advanced degrees in economics, but pick up little bits and pieces here and there. The more of those folks we can direct towards our materials, the more we can educate in the Austrian School. OK. How about the future? Well, I think the educational mission of the Institute is more important than ever today.

18:48And we have unprecedented opportunities for growth and influence because, as I've mentioned, some of you have heard me talk about this on other occasions, the traditional institutions of higher education are themselves in a state of crisis today. I mean, if you think about it, the modern university is quite an anachronism, the concept of higher education goes back at least to medieval antiquity, but the modern university with its sprawling campus, complexes of classroom buildings, libraries, labs, dorms, offices and so on, it's only a hundred, hundred and fifty years old, and the truth is that most of these institutions are simply much too large. They're unable to perform economic calculation, as Mises explained in his Work on the Socialist Calculation Debate.

19:36In all likelihood, the university of the future will be radically decentralized. Already, much of the intellectual activity in the U.S. and a lot of the real academic research takes place not in the established universities, but in private organizations and think tanks, in private research institutes like the Mises Institute. Many university professors dream of having a position at a private institution like this, where they don't have to teach huge lecture classes filled with indifferent students. They don't have to deal with the politicized curricula and the mandatory sensitivity training sessions and all the rest of it. In the memo to F.A. Harper, Baldie Harper that I quoted before, Rothbard also has an interesting passage where he describes his ideal educational institution.

20:29It should be located close to a good university library, he wrote, although with the work that Jeff described on Mises.org, even that criterion may become obsolete. But this ideal educational institution should not be formally affiliated with the university, in Rothbard's view. Rothbard said the following, quote, Our intellectual revolution cannot and will not come about simply via the existing academic establishment, which fosters narrowness, conformity, orthodoxy, etc. All major intellectual revolutions of the past have taken place in new centers of study outside the established universities. Rothbard then quotes a passage from a book called The Crisis of Western Education.

21:18The quotation is the following. We should note that the progress and diffusion of the Enlightenment was in large measure due to special institutes and academies, such as the Royal Academy of London and the Academy of Sciences in Paris. This is particularly important because the universities were, for the most part, indifferent, if not hostile, to the Enlightenment, and in fact did not then carry on the research activities which were necessary to the promoting of useful knowledge. Well, the Mises Institute functions exactly as such a new institution, a new, more radical and unencumbered organization that is free to pursue radical scholarship in the science of liberty.

22:03That's why the research and particularly the teaching functions of the institute are are so important and that's why the research activities of the institute and particularly the teaching function, for example Mises University, other educational conferences, books and materials, resources for teachers are so critically important to bringing about the future that we all imagine and we thank you for making all of this possible.

22:38Thank you very much.