Chicago’s free-market reputation

I was surprised by this from Lanny Ebenstein’s biography, Milton Friedman:

“Neither historically nor in his time to the present has the political orientation of Chicago’s Department of Economics been mostly free market. In a 1991 article on Laughlin, the first head of economics at Chicago, Friedman writes that the department had always had ‘prominent members who held these [free market] views and presented them effectively. But they were always a minority. The Department has always been characterized by hereogeneity of policy views, not homogeneity.’ What distinguished Chicago from elsewhere when Friedman was on the faculty and to the present was not the presence of market-oriented scholars at Chicago but rather their absence elsewhere” (pp. 59-60).