The Ec Department Is Only A Start

THE STILL-UNRELEASED Economics visiting committee report has opened the closet door to the Economics Department and to university education as a whole. The time has come to pull out the skeletons rotting there and give them a proper public burial.

For years graduate students have been saying the Economics Department is in sorry shape. They have protested the rigidity of the program, the department's total dependence on neo-classical theory, and its failure to hire radical economists. And they have been disappointed and disgusted with a senior faculty that neither taught nor cared about graduate students and their needs.

So what's new? What's new is that a University visiting committee selected by the Board of Overseers and led by a former member of the Federal Reserve Board inspected the Economics Department last December and found it guilty of all the graduate student's charges--so guilty that the committee wondered whether the department can "effectively function in the future."

Many would argue that the Economics Department has not effectively functioned for years. Given this dismal record the problem is not so much one of the future as of the present.

The visiting committee report recommends that the senior faculty in the Economics Department devote more time to teaching, that the curriculum be reformed to include subjects "not traditionally taught at Harvard," and that more women and minorities be hired to meet affirmative action guidelines.

In contrast to the graduate program, the visiting committee found the undergraduate program in Economics to be in excellent shape, largely because the faculty and teaching fellows spend time teaching students. There is no reason why this cannot be done with equal success on the graduate level.

The committee's proposals are well-founded and the department should implement them immediately. But they do not address the deeper problems in the department and they do not in themselves guarantee any type of reform.

The Economics Department is a collection of some 60 faculty members who have been hired on the basis of their research and their publications in the field of neo-classical economics. Even if the department requires them to devote more time to teaching it is questionable whether they will be capable of it. Graduate students in the department claim that there are only three or four tenured professors who can adequately teach a course.

Teaching problems aside, it is doubtful whether the Economics faculty are willing to accept curriculum reform and the faculty changes it would require. They have a vested interest in rejecting new courses and professors that will challenge the validity of their neo-classical approach and their emphasis on research. The Economics Department has consistently refused to hire radical economists, arguing that they were not academically qualified to receive tenure. But the department has made no systematic attempt to search for what it defines as "qualified" radicals, although they certainly exist and students have certainly asked for them.

Faculty with a different perspective must be hired if the department is to change. The inclusion of alternative methods of analysis in the curriculum and the general exam is the worst sort of farce if the department does not hire professors capable of teaching alternative theories. One Economics graduate student defined the problem last week, saying, "They put Marxist analysis on the last general exam, but there was no one in the department teaching Marxist economics."

JUDGING BY THIS past performance it is doubtful that the Economics Department can reform itself. Its failure to act on the six-month-old visiting committee recommendations is bad enough, but there is even more evidence to indict the department.

James S. Duesenberry, chairman of the Economics Department, told the graduate students last Friday that "the faculty's right to self-perpetuation is a sacred cow" that it "is just not in the cards to change." One student replied that "it is just this sacred cow that we must slay if we are going to change this department."

And he was right. Sacred cows belong to Eastern religions and the right to self-perpetuation was buried with Louis XVI's head over two hundred years ago. It is time the Economics Department and the rest of Harvard's gilded academics understood this and descended from their theoretical nirvanas and research fiefdoms to start teaching students and solving real problems. This is precisely what the visiting committee report recommends.

To effect this change, the Graduate Economics Club voted last Friday to demand that two students sit on all Economics Department hiring committees. This student presence is essential. It is the only way of penetrating the department and forcing the tenured faculty to face its own deficiencies and to recognize student needs.

The Graduate Economics Club also voted to organize a complete student evaluation of the Economics professors and to organize the first meeting ever between them and the graduate students.

These are excellent proposals that should be acted on immediately along with the visiting committee recommendations to begin solving the problems in the Economics Department. But it would be a mistake to consider these problems as unique to any one academic department. The Economics Department is only the most current and most public example of a common malaise afflicting all of Harvard academia to a lesser or greater degree. Regardless of degree, its symptoms are the same: an ingrown and complacent faculty too much concerned with research to the neglect of teaching, and a definition and acceptance of students as second-class citizens.

The Graduate Economics Club recommendation that students be included in the hiring process is the first clear demand, supported by official evidence of a department in decay, that students be recognized not as irresponsible transients or radical ogres, but as individuals with the right and the capacity to positively affect the decisions determining their education and four to six years of their lives. It was the students who pointed out the failings of the Economics Department, not the Faculty. And it was the students whom the visiting committee report agreed with.

Failure to include students as equal members in the Harvard community is a tyranny that has permitted the growth of an elitist and isolated faculty that sets its own standards and forces students to meet them.

IT IS CURIOUS that Harvard's neo-classical Economics Department is guilty of such gross monopoly practices, but that only serves to underline the severity of the problem. Every member of this community should follow the Graduate Economics Club's lead and demand changes in the University to make courses more relevant to students, to increase contact with senior faculty, and to force recognition of students as equals with the right to affect the decisions that determine their academic lives.

When the Faculty and a small selected group of students meet with Dean Rosovsky on Tuesday to discuss his "Letter on Undergraduate Education," they should follow the example of the Graduate Economics Club. They should organize a complete student evaluation of all professors, courses and departments to begin a coherent analysis of Harvard education. They should then vote to include students on the curriculum and hiring committees in every academic department.

Judging from the way Rosovsky has set up today's meeting--the first major discussion of what could be a set of sweeping changes in the nature of undergraduate education--the chances for that kind of reform do not seem especially good. Rosovsky has started off on the wrong foot with his reforms by effectively excluding the very people they are supposed to affect--students--from the first deliberations. The only students at today's meeting are members of faculty-student committees, and since the press is barred from the meeting the general student body will probably never find out anything about it.

The Economics Department is only the first small step to reforming the educational process at Harvard, but it is a good place to start.