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Buchanan and Devletoglou suggested an overhaul of higher education aimed at bringing the student movement to heel. At the time, California had proposed a master plan of universal free higher education across its system. But the authors of Academia in Anarchy argued that the proposal suffered from a lack of basic economics — meaning not simply economic calculation, but Buchanan’s conception of economics as an all-encompassing moral and behavioral philosophy. “Almost alone among social scientists,” they wrote, “the economist brings with him a model of human behavior which allows predictions about human action.”

Treating education as a “free good” meant that those who received it had no incentive to value it, and thus spent their years at university behaving as “man-children” playing a “psychedelic game.” Buchanan and Devletoglou recommended a student-loan system. “The scarcity value of a university education would at least be brought home to the student,”

In a twist that would become characteristic of later libertarian arguments, with softer echoes among technocratic liberals like Buttigieg, economically disciplining students was a matter of social justice for society at large. Free tuition that was intended to provide a path of mobility for less-fortunate citizens, especially racial minorities who suffered from centuries of accumulated exclusion, was actually a “gift to the gifted” — “a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich” — with the “poor taxpayer” cleverly but dubiously painted by Buchanan and Devletoglou as working-class citizens excluded from higher education.