LSE campaign demands Hayek Society abolition

Another day, another student fiasco. This time the scene of the crime is the London School of Economics and a new campaign called LSE Class War, launched earlier this month with its own radical manifesto.

Among the (fairly standard) demands for this groups are call for a ‘private school free’ LSE – a policy which would necessitate the removal of many of its international students – and calls to ‘decolonise LSE’ with ethnic minority quotas for the hiring of academics. More unusual is the demand to ‘install a David Graeber lecture series to celebrate the life of the revered professor’ – a reference to the left-wing academic who died last year.

This call to celebrate one former LSE academic is all the more noteworthy when one considers the campaign’s treatment of those hailing from other intellectual traditions. The group’s regard for ‘revered’ academics evidently does not extend to one Freiderich von Hayek, one of the twentieth century’s greatest economists, who lectured at the university from 1931 until 1950 and who won the 1974 Nobel Prize.