PFP252 | Bonus: Murray Rothbard as a Teacher: The UNLV Years—A Panel with Rothbard’s Former Students (AERC2023)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 252.

Over the years those lucky enough to study under Rothbard and Hoppe at UNLV in the 80s/90s have given some talks about their experiences there, usually spearheaded by Doug French, former Mises Institute President. This includes a panel at the Mises Institute’s 35th Anniversary event in New York in 2017 (schedule; Youtube playlist), and a panel at the Property and Freedom Society Annual Meeting in 2015 (PFP129 | Memories: Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) as Mentor and Teacher, Hoppe, DiLorenzo, French, Iglody (PFS 2015)).

The most recent panel was at the Austrian Economics Research Conference in March 2023, presented on October 7, 2017, entitled “Murray Rothbard as a Teacher: The UNLV Years—A Panel with Rothbard’s Former Students (AERC2023)” (informally titled in the schedule “Murray in Las Vegas”).

Conversations About Murray (attend one or all!)

The panelists were:

• Douglas E. French (Mises Institute), Chair
• Jeffrey F. Barr, Attorney, Las Vegas, NV
• Joseph F. Becker, Mises Institute
• Richard Tejidor, Los Angeles, CA
• James Yohe, Gadsden State Community College

(Audio file: mp3)

Some photos from the event are appended below. Transcript below.

Photos:

TRANSCRIPT

Murray Rothbard as a Teacher: The UNLV Years—A Panel with Rothbard’s Former Students

Austrian Economics Research Conference, Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama

March 17, 2023

Douglas E. French, Jeffrey F. Barr, Joseph F. Becker, Richard Tejidor, James Yohe

DOUG FRENCH: So my name is Doug French. I studied under Murray from roughly ’89 to ’92 or ’90 to ’92. Next to me is Joe Becker, and you studied under Murray what years?

00:00:13

JOE BECKER: ’91 to ’93.

00:00:14

DOUG FRENCH: ’91 to ’93. And next up is Rich.

00:00:18

JAMES YOHE: [indiscernible_00:00:20]

00:00:24

DOUG FRENCH: Don’t jump ahead. Rich, please introduce yourself and say what years you…

00:00:29

RICHARD TEJIDOR: Hi. I’m Rich Tejidor. I studied under Murray and Hans ’89 to ’94.

00:00:36

00:00:39

JAMES YOHE: James Yohe. I was there from ’91 until ’95.

00:00:45

JEFFREY BARR: I’m Jeff Barr. I was at UNLV with Hans and Murray from ’89 to ’95 and then took the very last class with Murray Rothbard [indiscernible_00:00:55].

00:00:57

DOUG FRENCH: All right, great. And you recognize this gentleman at the board. His name is Murray Rothbard, and as you’ve heard, we all had the pleasure of being struck by lightning, as I like to say. At this conference, we are celebrating the 60^th anniversary of the publication of America’s Great Depression. And I like to tell the story that I didn’t have any idea who Murray Rothbard was when I came to UNLV.

00:01:38

And just to illustrate that point, Murray had—you got graded on three things. There was a midterm, there was a final, and there was a paper of 10 pages. You could write it on anything, but you had to get the topic approved by Murray. So I went in to talk to Murray, and I said, yeah, Murray—or Dr. Rothbard, I’d like to write on the Great Depression. And he goes, oh, that would be great. Why don’t—yeah, pull up—look up Lionel Robbins, and he mentioned this one and that one. And then he said, oh yeah, I wrote something about that. Yeah, he wrote something about that. It’s America’s Great Depression. But I had no idea.

00:02:36

But that shows you the kind of guy he was if he was—if Murray Rothbard—if that had been the only thing he did, he probably would have been a little miffed that I didn’t know about him. But he was very gracious, and I have since lost the paper somewhere between—I had it in Turkey a few years ago when we did something like this, and I have since lost the paper, but I did okay. But that is my—that’s my little anecdote about America’s Great Depression.

00:03:15

So this is the employee identification card. If you were thinking that—and this is courtesy of the archives here at the Mises Institute. You can see Murray’s signature, president’s signature, Robert Maxson who was eventually booted probably for no good reason other than getting sideways with the basketball coach, Jerry Tarkanian. So you could get sideways with pretty much anybody at UNLV but not Jerry Tarkanian, but this is when Murray started. He showed up in Vegas in 1986. I moved to Vegas in ’86. Hans Hoppe moved to Vegas in ’86. He starts January the 1^st of ’87.

00:04:08

Now, this is a gradebook, and the only thing that I want to illustrate with this, and again, this is courtesy of the archives here at the Mises Institute, so I thank them for that. It’s not the fact that I got an A in the course. As you can tell, everybody got an A in the course almost. There is a B- and a C, and I have no idea how those people ended up getting that grade, but Murray was a notoriously easy grader. His tests were extraordinarily hard in some ways, but—and you’ll see one of his tests later in the program.

00:04:52

But you can see Murray, he—low-tech guy. He wasn’t putting anything on a computer. This was his gradebook. Now, when I went into talk about doing a thesis, I mentioned that I wanted to write on early speculative bubbles, and this is what Murray would hand you immediately. Whether you were writing a paper or whether you were writing a thesis, he would immediately give you—he would give you essentially a jumpstart in your research. And yes, that’s Murray’s handwriting, and no, I didn’t save any similar sorts of pieces of paper from other instructors I may have had at UNLV. But you can see John Carswell on the South Sea Bubble, Antoin Murphy, of course, on Richard Cantillon. And of course, Antoin Murphy is now the John Law expert. But this is what got me off the—this got me off the side of the dock in writing a thesis.

00:06:13

Now, the last time I saw Murray Rothbard was in December right before he died, in fact, about three weeks before he died. I happened to come back to Vegas from Reno. I went up to his office in Beam Hall. He wasn’t there. I waited patiently and waited and waited and waited. And of course, I was used to waiting and waiting. We all were. And he didn’t show up, so I took the elevator back down, and I opened the door, and there he was. And we went back up for a chat, and he was complaining about Chairman Thayer who was his new chair there.

00:07:04

And he handed me his employee evaluation. So you can see here that Professor Rothbard’s performance in the area of teaching has been satisfactory. No classroom materials, (syllabi, handouts, tests) have been provided. Evaluations indicate performance above the rest of the average. But again, he only did satisfactory. In professional growth, Rothbard’s performance was disappointing. During the ’81 calendar year, Rothbard was published in one article in a refereed journal. This work is in a lower-level journal, not indexed by the Journal of Economic Literature.

00:07:58

His performance in the area of service is disappointing. He seldom participates in the daily affairs of the department. So again, this is the way Murray was treated at UNLV. If anybody is under the delusion that he and Hans were somehow worshiped because they were the most well-known instructors at UNLV, they were not. He gets an overall grade of satisfactory. However, he has demonstrated only limited professional growth.

00:08:37

Murray was, as you can imagine, somewhat miffed, had asked him to teach or participate more in departmental affairs, teach more students, and be available as a role model to junior faculty. Now, this is the—his response to that evaluation, and it’s funny. It’s—his response is: Finally it is instructive to compare—or I must say that I am one of the best-known professors throughout the United States. He’s published two scholarly articles, published two smaller books during the year, but I’m—he does say that he wonders why Thayer states he would like me to teach more students, and yet he participated in the decision this year to abolish the MA program in theory and policy.

00:09:47

That’s what I took under my—when I went through. And I protest Chairman Thayer’s evaluation as an outrage. This is the first evaluation where I failed to attain satisfactory-to-excellent in every category, rates my work disappointing, demonstrated only limited professional growth. And I do not believe any unbiased person upon examining the record during ’91 could possibly conclude that.

00:10:25

In the words of Chairman Thayer, it is disappointing and demonstrates only limited professional growth. Of course, he’s attended all the department meetings. He’s attended—he’s kept office hours. He attended department meetings. He asked what daily life am I supposed to be missing? The only clue in Chairman Thayer’s remarks is that I’m supposed to be available as a role model to junior faculty. Apart from wondering why Mr. Thayer would possibly want someone with limited professional growth to serve as a role model, I must say that the best way someone including myself can so serve is to be allowed to go about his business as a scholar and a teacher without being subject to harassment.

00:11:10

In the first year I taught at UNLV, I was happy that two of my colleagues audited my entire History of Thought course, and again, I’m always available to answer questions. Surely, no one can reasonably be expected to do more than that. And he goes on to mention he’s the best—one of the best-known professors in the United States and abroad that was teaching at UNLV.

00:11:37

Students have come from around the country, a few that are sitting here, to study under him, both in undergraduate and graduate levels. Some of the best economics students have been attracted here by virtue of Rothbard being there. It’s ironic that Chairman Thayer states that he would like me to teach more students, and yes, again, he got rid of the theory and policy track.

00:12:06

So anyway, I moved to Reno, so it’s not like Murray just let you go and never communicate with you ever again. I traded letters with him because he thought I had made a contribution in the Tulipmania area. And this was a response to some of my frustration with some of the feedback I was getting from scholarly journals. And—but what I wanted to mention about this is also he gets into a little gossip here, and he says I’m not teaching enough students otherwise.

00:12:56

On the other hand, Nasser, the chairman, is trying to be fair-minded. He’s done a few things to offset Tom Carroll, the evil Tom Carroll as we know, though he remains as a prisoner of the graduate economics as well. El Stupo, John Brown, that doesn’t mean anything to you guys, but I had John Brown for macroeconomics and other things. There was a bit of a student revolt. We were all going to walk out, but [indiscernible_00:13:27], who was one of our classmates, said, listen, I’m getting an A. I’m not walking out. You guys can walk out if you want to. And anyway, we all stuck it out, and we made it through.

00:13:37

But John Brown was–well, let’s just say he was a guy who would fill up the chalkboard with equations, get down to the end, and he was wrong, and he couldn’t figure it out, and [indiscernible_00:13:48] would go up and point the error in his ways. But—and he mentions the new—a new teacher, Helen Neal. Did any of you have Helen Neal? Yeah, and of course, she’s a pro-free market type choice or public choice, albeit in the dippy questionnaire, experimental economics variety. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that sort of description before.

00:14:31

But Murray was very good about trading letters, and rumor has it there is a, shall we say, file cabinet after file cabinet of letters, possibly somewhere in this building. Oh, he does mention Perot because I asked him a politics question, and, of course, he always enjoyed talking politics. And I had asked him about the debate. But what he says here I think that’s interesting is the typical self-made billionaire, Perot, refuses to take advice from media or debate consultants, and so he was clobbered. I think that’s probably the case with all self-made billionaires. They don’t take anybody’s advice.

00:15:21

But he was certainly into politics. He was in politics that year. Perot and Pat, and he was on Pat Buchanan’s Kitchen Cabinet for a while, and then he supported Bush for a while, and it was really something. So I want to go to the panelist Q&A. These guys all have a different perspective that they can give you on Murray and what it was like to study under Murray. But I want to talk to—nobody—Murray doesn’t get around to teach if it’s not—or go to the study groups that are going to be talked about except for Rich. Rich happened to drive Murray around. As many of you know, Murray didn’t drive, didn’t know how to drive, and so what was that like, Rich, toting Murray around?

00:16:31

RICHARD TEJIDOR: Well, after we’d have one of our classes, we’d have a study group every week. And I’d walk with him to my car in the parking lot, and we’d get in my car and drive across the street a few hundred feet to the Caro’s restaurant for our study group. And then after that, I would drive him home very slowly so I wouldn’t—I didn’t want to get in an accident with him in the car and have that on my conscience.

00:17:02

One time, we were in the car, and I had the club back in the ‘90s to protect your car from getting stolen. It’s like a rod, and he was like, what’s that? And I was like, well, it’s just a—to prevent my car from getting stolen. And he was like, someone would steal this car? I was like, yeah, it’s a 1965 Chevy Malibu classic. It’s a super sport. He was like, interesting. But—and then when I would drop him off at his house, well, I’d usually have a question pre-planned while we were doing the short drive, driving very slowly. Then he’d thank me for the ride, and he’d get out, and he was not very tall, but he’d slam my car door every time, and I would just prepare myself because it was just like, and he was like, bye, bye. But that was my experience driving.

00:17:57

DOUG FRENCH: So what was your impression of—you were in the Caro study group, so this is beyond the classroom. Murray would go with some of these gentlemen and others, and you would go through his books. You had the benefit of Murray Rothbard teaching Man, Economy, and State in Caro’s Restaurant after class, right?

00:18:25

JAMES YOHE: He would teach—we’d go through the books with him, and usually someone would set it up, and we would go over there. And you’d sit there and take classes from other professors, especially at UNLV, and you just realized you’re in the presence of brilliance. There’s nothing else like it. There’s no way that you’re going to ever be able to get something like this again. So you did cherish it. And there was a little fear factor involved too because you didn’t want to go there and not be prepared or say something.

00:19:16

Everything you ever said to Murray was probably stupid on your part but—Murray Rothbard, but it was just an amazing experience. I never experienced anything like it. I went through, got my PhD, and I never experienced anything close to being in a setting like that with Murray or Hans Hoppe or anything like that, I mean, nothing close, nothing that even compares.

00:19:52

JEFFREY BARR: So you have to understand. We had the books ahead of time. A lot of times we couldn’t afford the books. The books were hard to get. So we had another buddy who was a copy jockey over at the local copy shop, and he’d copy the books for us, and so we’d read the books ahead of time to try and prepare for these meetings, and I was terrified like James. I never said a word because I didn’t want anybody to think that I was a nut or didn’t know what he was talking about. But I mean it was just in the air. You lived and breathed Austrian economics. And yes, we all took classes, and the classes were fine. The classes were interesting. But this is where we learned Austrian economics. And both Rothbard and Hoppe had a sort of student seminar like this.

00:20:38

JAMES YOHE: I went on to get my PhD here, and I probably learned more in a coffee shop and a dive bar than I ever learned and paid for in a university. It was just—there’s nothing to compare with.

00:20:59

JOSEPH BECKER: Well, thanks to some help from Susie in the archives, we have a special little gift for Richard Tejidor, Rothbard’s chauffeur. What he may not have known is that Murray could drive. He had a driver’s license. So either he just abused Richard, or he just really liked spending time with him, or he loved that car. So that’s for you, Richard.

00:21:25

[APPLAUSE]

00:21:31

DOUG FRENCH: Now, Joe, you were not at Caro’s, but I understand you were at the stakeout, and Hans’ stakeout was kind of an offshoot of what Murray put together or somebody put together at Caro’s Restaurant.

00:21:50

JOSEPH BECKER: Yeah, and I don’t remember exactly. I remember going to one meeting somewhere on campus where we gathered around a table, and it seems to me it was even in a different building than Beam Hall, which is where the business, and hence, economics department was in this case but certainly the stakeout. And when I wasn’t playing video poker, I really enjoyed spending time with Hans, and he would stay until, what, midnight, 1 in the morning. As long as the beer lasted, Hans was there.

00:22:19

DOUG FRENCH: This is where we’re supposed to move on. So who headed up these Caro’s meetings? Was there a student that kind of took charge of these and then either Murray or Hans would sit back and be the grand master? How did that work?

00:22:46

JOSEPH BECKER: Well, probably we owe Bud Bennamin [phonetic] a special thanks. I think we all know Bud. He operated a body shop—I mean in the traditional sense—in Las Vegas. And he somehow sidled his way into student government and procedure for us some sort of funding for this economics club, which, of course, kept the stakeout activities funded.

00:23:10

DOUG FRENCH: But it was a little bit different for Caro’s.

00:23:16

JAMES YOHE: That was a little bit different. Scott Keyarr [phonetic] was involved a lot. I think Jim Philbin early on. I’m the baby of the group, so I kind of got there last, but I think Philbin was involved, Jim Philbin, Scott Keyarr, and then Lee Clouti was very instrumental. He’d make sure we’d get the copies and things that we needed, but those were kind of the main students. The way that the whole thing worked was there was kind of a hierarchy, especially at the stakeout.

00:23:50

Dr. Hoppe would sit at kind of the head of the table, and then Joe and Jim Philbin and a couple of the other students. Scott Keyarr and graduate students would be kind of closest to him. And then it would kind of go back, and so I was always at this other end of the table and just trying to hear. But you’d move up. You’d kind of get to move up a little bit. You talked to someone, and he’d say, oh, read this, this, and this. So you’d go and you’d read that. You’d come back the next week. You’d talk about it, and then maybe you’d move up a little further on the table.

00:24:21

Okay, read this, this, and this. Have you read this? No. I’ve never read that. You’ve got to read this. You can’t—and then you kind of moved your way up as you got more experience, been there longer. And there was—I think it was an informal system to it all. You walk in. I mean, everybody has seen Hans Hoppe and met him. He can be kind of scary at the beginning, but he really wasn’t. He was probably one of the sweetest men I ever met, he and Dr. Rothbard. But you just kind of get your confidence up a little bit, and you move up a little bit down the table, and Richard here was very instrumental to me and Joseph here. I was the puppy, so I got to kind of learn from them, and they would give me things to read, and things like that.

00:25:18

DOUG FRENCH: By the way, there was no grades given out for this. This was something you did all voluntarily just to absorb the knowledge of these guys. By the way, Jim Philbin, if you’re out there, [indiscernible_00:25:36] if you’re out there, we want to hear from you because these people have vanished. And the first time I saw Jim Philbin was carrying Murray’s stool the first night of class that I had Murray, so I knew the guy carrying his stool must be kind of important. I mean, he was in my class. So anyway, these people have vanished off the face of the Earth. They’re known around the Mises Institute, and we would love to hear from you.

00:26:09

JAMES YOHE: Bill Curl too. Bill Curl was very helpful too.

00:26:13

DOUG FRENCH: Okay, all right. Jeff, did you have anything in this? So I wanted to go to Joe on—you wrote a thesis under Murray, as did I. But let’s hear your experience.

00:26:34

JOSEPH BECKER: Well, I did a law and economics thesis. I used the Austrian school to analyze a US Supreme Court regulatory takings case. I regret a little bit that I hadn’t gone to law school first, but I guess I would describe Murray was insightful into almost everything including law and economics more so than just pure economics in my case. He was directive but not overly so. Like most graduate students, as we see in our graduate program, people start out trying to explain the world. So he properly narrowed my focus on things that should have been narrowed to.

00:27:20

I never felt like—I mean, we went through a number of iterations as is usually the case I think, maybe more in my case. I’m not sure. But I never found him to be impatient or unwilling to take a look at subsequent iterations of what I’d done as I discovered my way through the process of analyzing this regulatory takings case out of South Carolina.

00:27:48

DOUG FRENCH: So I wanted to mention we all had the experience of waiting for Murray or Hans at Beam Hall at UNLV, fourth floor. They were both on the east end, correct? You’d get off the elevator. You’d take a right and then a quick left. You look down there. You see if someone is sitting on the floor waiting for Murray. And eventually a chair would appear, and you would see if somebody was in the chair. That would give you an indication of how long you were going to have to wait.

00:28:21

And Murray wasn’t going to rush anybody off. I think Hans had his office hours in the morning, Murray in the evening, and—but there’s no reason to go to Beam Hall anymore. They have scrubbed any remnants of the existence of Rothbard or of Hoppe at UNLV. The only Beam Hall is right here, and I might make the suggestion that maybe something might be renamed Beam Hall in this wonderful building, but that’s just maybe a silly notion of mine.

00:29:13

But I think we all had that experience waiting to talk to Murray, and as you say, he—at least with me, he’d ask as many questions as he answered. But the condition of his office obviously as someone who is somewhat disorganized in my affair, Murray was of the same caliber. So anybody spend enough time in Murray’s office to describe it?

00:29:49

JOSEPH BECKER: Well, I don’t know that it was altogether unlike what you sort of imagine is a typical professor’s office, a little clutter, stacks of books and papers, works in progress. But I always had the impression that however much that was the case in his office, I never visited his home. I never drove him there. But I still had the suspicion that most of the work that he did was not out of the university office. That was just for the stuff that he needed for students at the university. But rather, most of his work was done at home.

00:30:27

And story has it that that would sometimes be from—I mean, his classes at UNLV were always in the evening. I mean, I think the earliest you would ever get to the university is maybe 3:30, 4 o’clock in the afternoon. So my understanding is most of his work was done until 3, 4 5 in the morning, get a few hours’ sleep before he came in at the crack of 3 or 4 in the afternoon.

00:30:52

DOUG FRENCH: Crack of 3 or 4. So we’re going to—you’ll get an idea about lectures and so on, but just—and I open this up to anybody. Was it difficult to take notes in a Murray Rothbard lecture?

00:31:16

JOSEPH BECKER: Since I have the mic, I know I’ll be passing it down, but to describe what Murray’s classes were like, I’d say they were entertaining because it’s kind of like a stand-up comedy routine oftentimes. But the problem is you were required to memorize, or you were going to have to get the material down so you could memorize it for the exams. I don’t remember the exams ever being open book. So while it was entertaining, it was also a little bit stressful. I think you already mentioned, Doug, that there were no—there were books that typically—the books typically assigned were probably required of the university for the program. But that’s not what he taught. He taught from sort of a stack of loosely organized, yellow legal pages. And so very entertaining, but it was sometimes difficult to make sure you got everything down that needed to be gotten down.

00:32:15

RICHARD TEJIDOR: Like when I first took his—took my first class with Murray, I realized that there was no way I could take notes without a tape recorder because he would go on tangent after tangent and just—it was just too much information for a human to consume with a pen and paper. But so I would transcribe the tapes. Then I would have notes. Otherwise, it would be impossible.

00:32:43

JAMES YOHE: I never worked so hard in a class in my life. I mean, I just wanted to write down every word he said. It was—some people have commented on his lecturing style, which I really loved. He would lecture on something like he might be starting talking about some Chinese philosopher. And then he would go off on this tangent, and he’d get all the way to Hillary Clinton. But he’d go right back to where he left off.

00:33:14

So I liked it, and I miss—I’d love to sit there and listen to him lecture again today. But I liked his lectures. A lot of people didn’t, but I thought—I always thought if you kind of realized that he’s going to get to some point, and he’s going to go off on a tangent, but the tangent would all follow. I took it for his history of thought. He was writing his treatise on it, and he followed the whole class.

00:33:47

Usually there was one main thread that was involved in it when I took it and then when I sat in on other’s people’s classes—another class later. Mine, it was utility. He went through the history of mankind and everything anybody could have thought about utility and would just bring it all the way to Hillary Clinton or somebody like that and then just go back and, okay, next guy and bring it off into some other thing. Here’s how what this guy said relates to Adam Smith or something like that and work his way back and just keep going on the straight line.

00:34:21

JEFFREY BARR: The only thing I’ll say about lectures is—and I’ll talk more about this in my remarks, but there were people that would take the class once, and then there would be people that would take the class again and again and again. They would just sit in the class. It’s sort of like a river. It’s never the same river twice. You’ve heard that old proverb. Rothbard’s classes were never the same class twice.

00:34:41

DOUG FRENCH: Anybody who’s read A History of Economic Thought or—his History of Economic Thought were essentially follow—they essentially follow his notes in class. And you said it was utility. For me, the year I took it, it was financial, financial history. And so it’s no wonder that I write a thesis on early speculative bubbles. That makes sense. But as Jeff said, every class was different, and depending on what he was going to focus on.

00:35:22

And remember, of course, that’s a two-volume work, and we kind of raced through that letter that he had written me very quickly. But he said in that letter I’ve already written a third volume. It’s just still in my head. So—and that’s the way it was. But—so we talked about Joe and Murray’s help with his thesis. Rich, you started a thesis with him, or how did that work?

00:36:11

RICHARD TEJIDOR: I finished it, yes, started and finished it.

00:36:13

DOUG FRENCH: Oh okay. I didn’t catch that finished part, good. And now you got the license.

00:36:18

RICHARD TEJIDOR: Now I got—this is better than the diploma, more valuable too.

00:36:24

DOUG FRENCH: Make a deal for that later.

00:36:28

RICHARD TEJIDOR: I finished the thesis, and then I—it was in December of ’94, December ’94, and then I brought him a big bottle of liquor. I can’t remember what it was. It was his favorite. And he was like, what are you doing? I go, I’m going to go to South America for a few months. He’s like, don’t get killed. Don’t get killed. Be careful. I said don’t worry. I’m going to the civilized part. Anyway, but in January, that was his last year.

00:37:03

DOUG FRENCH: So Joe, you had said something that you thought he did most of his work at home. Were any of you at his house on Weatherford? Okay, so I would be the only one who was there. And for whatever reason, again, I’m the guy that showed up who had no idea who he was. But he invited me to a faculty dinner that he and Joey put on. And so Joey’s in the kitchen cooking, and we had various professors there, and they’re asking me questions that I don’t know the answer to. And of course, I was there by myself, so it was somewhat uncomfortable. But again, it just shows you how magnanimous that Murray was to include a student in a faculty dinner, the letters we traded over a couple-year span.

00:38:07

He is never—I don’t think he ever forgot any of us. That’s the sense I get. I don’t know about you guys. But I think that he was always there. If you were working on something, he was encouraging and just beyond any instructor that I can think of ever having. And again, I think the word brilliant gets thrown around probably way too much, but I think the five of us have seen brilliant. And it’s extraordinary when you get to live it over and over. So anything else from the classroom, the—before we get to kind of the main event? We’re working up to something here, folks. So don’t anybody go anywhere because you’re going to get a kick out of what we’re going to do. But we’re running way ahead because we’re all anxious, and we’re all talking fast. And so, James?

00:39:37

JAMES YOHE: Just a couple of things. One of the things, what you’re talking about, how supportive he was, I didn’t deserve to wash his feet, so I was just blessed to be able to be around him. But he was always very encouraging. I mean, if you’re writing a paper or if you were—I had a newspaper column for the college paper. And he would read it. Was Murray Rothbard reading my little article? He would come in, and he would say get ‘em, get ‘em. He’d do this because I guess I was a muckraker.

00:40:17

But he was always very encouraging, very friendly. He knew what you were doing. And when I met Joey Rothbard, it was after Murray had passed. I walked up, and I didn’t think he mentioned me anywhere. I walked up, and I said hi, Mrs. Rothbard. I was a student of your husband’s. And she said, oh, you’re James. Yeah. And it was like she kind of knew me. And I’m sitting there. Why would Murray Rothbard be telling his wife about me?

00:40:49

And then the last thing I wanted to do was talk about just kind of the overall atmosphere. We left out—we’re leaving out a big part of UNLV and being Austrian at UNLV, and that’s having Dr. Hoppe around. The two of them together—there was nothing to compare to, nothing, nothing. Dr. Hoppe was—everybody says what they think of him. But he was actually probably the most considerate and just he would do anything for you.

00:41:26

He did anything for us. He met with us once a week. He—we would have—we all were part of something called Political Economy Club. And to justify our $500 in drinking money, we had to—we did more than drink with it. We made—well, Lee got us free photocopies, but we would put on events, and we’d have speakers. And I remember one time we had a speaker drop out, and we went to Dr. Hoppe, and he had a speech he was preparing to give. He says, oh yeah, yeah, and he pulls his speech out of the drawer, and he gives it for us, not something he had canned, something that was brand new.

00:42:06

But I never even heard of anyone spending that much time away from class, outside of class with a professor. I never heard of it. Maybe some older professors have done it, or maybe I just didn’t go to the right places, but not only had I never