Ec 1: A Monster Becomes an Institution Everything About Ec 1 Pleases Gill Now Except Gen Ed Status

Economics 1 has never been unknockable. Students always moan a little about the ultra-general final exam questions and the obscurities of Dorfman's price theory text. And all but the most even-tempered freshmen at times grow resentful of the inevitable calculus wonk who loudly corrects mistakes in his section man's graphs. These are minor irritants though. The vast majority of students (95 per cent according to a 1962 Economics Department survey) end up satisfied with Ec 1 and the course hardly seemed a target for radical discontent.

So the prospect of a critique of Economics 1 by the Harvard-Radcliffe Young People's Socialist League was a bit startling both to those who run the course and those who take it. The eight-page document, released last month, was an anti-climax. Though well-researched and well-written, it blunted the edge of its militancy with too much scholarly prose, and too little focus on how the course should change.

The critique drew mixed reviews. Arthur Smithies, Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy, thought it raised economic issues that deserved to be considered seriously. Several Ec 1 sectionmen and former sectionmen said they agreed completely with its criticisms of the course. But Richard T. Gill '48, lecturer in Economics and administrative head of Ec 1 since 1959, didn't like the critique at all, and his opinion was crucial.

Unruffled

Gill wasn't ruffled by the sight of a pair of students telling him in print how the course should be run. And though he found the eight pages full of faulty economics, he wasn't worried about the effect of these errors. What bothered him was what he considered the narrowness of the critique's "new left" view of economics. The public "dialogue" its authors insistently demanded was just what Gill wanted to avoid. This is Gill's final year as head of the course and he understandably does not want to leave it in a blaze of artificial controversy over issues he considers trivial.

A month after the critique was issued, it appears to have failed as an instrument of radical reform. At a March 6 Ec 1 staff meeting Gill asked if there was any sentiment for revising the course substantially; only a couple of hands went up. Several of the section men who liked the critique best didn't even bother to attend. Whether the critique succeeded in exposing serious deficiencies in Economics 1 is still an open question.

Curiously the critique is more a reactionary than a radical document. Though the critique's author Stephen Kelman '70 and his confederates would deplore the suggestion that they wanted a return to the good old days, it is ironic that instituting all the practical changes their criticisms implied would make the course much as it was in the late 50's.

Before Gill took over the course in the spring of 1959, he and three others in the Department submitted a massive plan for revising Ec 1 (their outline for the revised course was more than 20 pages long). Gill acted, he says, because "Economics 1 had settled into a rut; the focus was too much on the system in the United States here and now parts of the course got bogged down in diagramatics so that students were learning tools and not much else."

During the late '50's both the number of students taking Ec 1 and the number concentrating in Economics were declining. Since Gill took over course enrollment has soared from 550 to this year's all-time high of 829.

Gill made three big changes in Ec 1's content. He added the section on British industrialism and the classical economists that now fills the first month of the course, as well as the chunk on the Soviet economy (being taught this week and next) and the exhaustive treatment of underdeveloped countries that occupies the rest of the spring.

To make room for the new material, three weeks on distribution (which the critique says is now inadequately treated by a few sentences in Dorfman) were trimmed and the material reinserted in other parts of the course. The other major casualty was a three week section on "alternavties to capitalism" that used to come during reading period, right after the course had developed micro-economic theory and applied it to American capitalism. (It was the critique's final and most specific charge that socialism receives only "confusing attention" now in Ec 1.)

The history of economic theory is Gill's special interest, but he says that "personal predilections" only partly explain how Ricardo and Arkwright found their way into an introductory economics course. The first month of Ec 1 is designed, says Gill, "to convey the relativity of present economic conditions to institutions and ideas of the past, to relate economics to the rest of the social sciences."

The value may be here, but it escapes many students. A survey the Economics Department took in 1962 asked those who took the course whether there should be more or less on each of the 14 topics covered. The pollees voted for more of everything but economic history and Gill accordingly chopped out a third of the material. Some feel he should have gone farther.

"The course has to be introduced with a problem," says one section man, "but the story of how England got to be the kind of economy it is, is not as germaine as it might be for the majority of students." Another, who is in his third year teaching the course, says, "At first I couldn't see any point to it, but now I'm starting to agree with Gill that it's a good way to get people started."

Behind the criticisms of Ec 1's historical material and behind last month's critique as well is the conviction that the course would be better if it were more political. "This is the only course most people take in economics," says a section man, "so there ought to be more time on present problems and less on economic tools." Kelman's call for more "controversy" in Economics I was based on a similar idea--the course should be constantly examining both sides of economic questions instead of trying to develop an objective economic theory first.

The critique's vision of an issues-oriented introductory course is not a new idea. In the late '50's and early '60's Harvard had a Gen Ed course called "Economics of the Citizen" which tried this approach. It never became as popular as the more rigorous Ec 1. Eventually it gained the reputation of being a gut of little substance that the self-respecting avoided. Gill argues that talking explicitly about controversy isn't always the best way to equip students to talk about political problems--"you can't just describe economics--you've got to get down to working those damn curves to understand the problems."

Gill's 1959 plan changed the structure of Ec 1 as well as the material it covers. In the old days Ec 1 lectures were strictly a star show-each of the Department's great men mounted the podium once and talked for an hour to the crowds below. Though continuity may still be lacking, the lectures under Gill's regime have a function. They come in blocks instead of being scattered sporadically throughout the term and the blocks give the course more structure than it once had by forcing section men to keep pace with upcoming lectures.

Lectures are scheduled on the kind of material that probably wouldn't otherwise get covered--background to policy and development questions where vast amounts of knowledge have to be condensed and jammed into a single meeting. The section men are left with huge chunks of the course material -- notably microeconomic theory for which they have to develop a teaching approach of their own. This ingenious division of labor, Gill's biggest improvement, has made the monster course smooth and flexible.

Gill has been the influential figure in giving Ec 1 its present shape, but he doesn't run the course by himself. Actually Economics 1 is governed like a Harvard in miniature--responsibility is scattered and different kinds of decisions are made at different levels. In the course catalogue, the Department chairman's name always is listed first--even before Gill's. Most years the chairman gets no closer to the mechanics of the course than providing section men and giving a couple lectures, but the listing indicates that