A Record for the University of Virginia?

According to a story that appeared after the death of Ronald Coase, both Coase and James Buchanan were deliberately pushed out of the University of Virginia for political reasons.

In 1994, Coase told this reporter how one of his UVA colleagues accidentally received a copy of a secret dossier compiled by then Dean of the Faculty Robert Harris in which Harris outlined a plan to change the economics faculty. Under then President Edgar Shannon, Harris allegedly used non-promotion and non-offer-matching to force Jefferson Center scholars to disperse. Coase left UVA for Chicago in 1964; Buchanan departed four years later.

"I think [the report] was very damning because it makes quite clear what their attitude was and there was actually a policy to get rid of us," Coase said. "My wife once heard someone at a cocktail party describe me as someone to the right of the John Birch society. It wasn't true. You know, I'm English and have a completely different history from most of the other people and am not really much involved at all in American politics."

According to one of the accounts I read (but cannot at the moment find), part of the incentive for UVA to try to get rid of Coase and Buchanan was an implied threat by one of the major foundations not to fund them unless they did.

Both Coase and Buchanan later received Nobel Prizes for their work. According to one commenter on the Coase/UVA story:

UVA also ran off Dr. Barry Marshall, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005 for his discovery that H. Pylori causes gastric ulcers. He did the majority of his work — and published his seminal papers— while he was at UVA. The good ole' boys running internal medicine at UVA didn't think much of his work.

The University of Chicago is said to hold the record for the largest number of Nobel Prizes won by its faculty. Judging by these account, UVA may hold the record for the largest number of (future) Nobel Prizes lost.