A further curiosity about this is that Ely 
himself had been subjected to an effort to 
fire him at Wisconsin in the 1890s by members 
of the state legislature who objected to his 
advocacy of workmens' compensation.  The 
oversight body of the university did not fire 
him and its statement regarding this included 
something that has come to be viewed as a 
symbol of the university, appearing on a plaque 
on the central building of the campus.  I do not 
remember it fully, but it says something to the 
effect that at that university there will be no 
restricting the "process of sifting and winnowing 
by which alone the truth shall be discovered." 
The "sifting and winnowing" line in particular 
has been viewed as almost as a mantra there, 
to the point of being a cliched joke. 
      Regarding the Friedman affair, I note that 
Ross was not in the economics department at 
that time.  Friedman did not approach the ACLU 
for support, the matter never getting into the courts, 
so Ross cannot be held responsible, even indirectly, 
for what transpired. 
      Mark Perlman can probably comment on that 
matter more authoritatively, as his father, Selig, was 
Friedman's main supporter and was also the first 
Jewish faculty member at the university, I believe. 
Most now accept that anti-Semitism was probably 
a factor, at least on the part of some individuals, but 
it was not the only factor.  According to Robert Lampmann's 
book on A Century of Economics at Wisconsin (from the 
early 1990s, published by University of Wisconsin Press, 
I believe), at least as big a factor was that Friedman had 
been hired to teach statistics, and some of the institutionalists 
opposed him out of fear of math coming in and supplanting 
institutionalism, which in fact happened in the 1960s in the 
department. 
      The econometricians who 
eventually came in, Arnold Zellner and Arthur Goldberger, 
were drawn partly because of the presence of George Box 
in the statistics department.  Box was the son-in-law of 
R.A. Fisher, the population geneticist and biometrician, 
who visited periodically because of the presence of the 
geneticist Sewall Wright, who had come in the early 1950s 
at the invitation of James F. Crow.  Wright was a codiscoverer 
of the identification problem, among many other things. 
 
Barkley Rosser