Legitimizing The Radical Viewpoint

In the arcane world of bureaucratic politics, extreme and highly publicized actions often obscure more subtle areas where real change might be taking place.

Such a situation surfaced this week in the Economics Department, where controversy has long flared over the teaching of Marxian economics and the hiring of radical economists.

The department decided first of all to rehire Marxist Arthur MacEwan, assistant professor of Economics, on a one-year lectureship contract. This action insures that there will be courses in the field next year, staving off the possibility that no one in the Department next fall would be capable of teaching other than neoclassical economics.

But more important, an official curriculum review committee chaired by Kenneth J. Arrow, professor of Economics, issued a report recommending the inclusion of Marxian analysis in the required Economic Theory course taken by graduate students.

The committee report went on to recommend that two Faculty appointments be made to staff this course with people "whose primary teaching and research will adequately reflect the approaches represented in the [proposed course] syllabus."

The recommendations, Arrow said, would provide grad students with "valuable exposure to the ugly facts of the system."

Behind the diplomatic language, the committee is recommending a major change that until now has been bitterly resisted by the department's power structure--accepting radical analysis in the core curriculum taught to future economists.

Reluctance to legitimize Marxian economics this way has been the main reason the department has stood firm against the demands of both its graduate and undergraduate students, and of a determined minority of its senior professors, to give tenured appointments to radical economists.

But it appears that an obscure five-member committee may succeed in bringing the issues to a head in a way that more dramatic actions have not. The demands of the students and even a proposal authored by John Kenneth Galbraith, Warburg professor of Economics, to split the department into a regular and an experimental program have all met polite oblivion in recent years.

There is, of course, no guarantee that the same fate will not befall the Arrow committee's proposals. But the department has embarked on a major attempt to reform its curriculum with the Arrow Committee but one of six committees set up to review areas of the graduate and undergraduate curriculums.

The department is taking the results of the committees' investigations seriously. A recent report of a committee that studied the Economic History requirement for grad students, for example, sailed into effect without even being formally voted upon.

The department plans to begin discussion of the Arrow Committee's report this Tuesday, at a meeting of tenured professors.