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