{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01933050447901933, 'fraction_numerical': 0.000942951438000943, 'mean_word_length': 4.766304347826087, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Frank Knight as Teacher

Professor Frank Knight was the dominating intellectual force of the Economics Department during my student days. This dominance was not an easy prize: he was surrounded by colleagues as erudite and incisive as Jacob Viner, as closely tuned to the emerging trends in economic analysis as Henry Schultz, as broad in vision and knowledge as John Nef, as socially concerned as Paul Douglas, and as exciting as Henry Simons. Yet no serious student of economics left the University without bearing some marks of Knight. In some respects, a more improbable Moses, if Knight could ever forgive the figure could not be designed. There he was in his office, smoking cigarettes with the aid of a toothpick down to lengths, or possibly they should be called nonlengths, that threatened his moustache. There he was in the classroom, pursuing a new and monstrous fallacy in this week's New Republic, while we experienced students watched with unkind amusement the efforts of new students to keep remotely orderly lecture notes. Or, still in the classroom, he was conducting a debate with a colleague on the nature of costs, usina us as the unreliable channel of communication. How clearly I remember the occasion on which we were told to withdraw forthwith from economics if we did not understand the analysis of Ricardian rent about to be presented, and how, 10 minutes later, Knight explained that he had not understood it until two years before. And then he was in a colleague's classroom, expostulating at some argument clearly labeled as nonsense. He was a lovable, indomitable, improbable man, but his powerful influence did not derive from his eccentricities or his charm. One great source of his influence was the purity of his devotion to the pursuit of knowledge. Frank Knight transmitted, to a degree I have never seen equaled, a sense of unreserved commitment to the truth. This harsh mistress must be served even when the service was dangerous or painful. No authority was too august to challenge: Knight would not hesitate to tell Gabriel if his horn needed tuning. No contemporary passion was so