Econ Department To Cut Junior Seminars

The Economics Department has finalized its decision to cut junior seminars from next year’s curriculum after a restriction on the hiring of new visiting faculty members as a result of the financial crisis put strain on the department’s already limited teaching staff.

The department has already lost three professors this year to the Obama administration and has also been forced to reassess its curriculum to account for the elimination of new visiting professorships.

According to Economics Department Chair James H. Stock, only the two visiting professors whose contracts were set before the economic crisis began will remain at Harvard next year. Visiting professors taught a dozen undergraduate and graduate courses this semester.

“The cost has been the elimination of the junior seminar program,” he said, describing it as a “trade-off”.

Junior seminars are non-required courses “designed to introduce students to research in a particular field of economics,” according to the course catalogue. They are the only small, undergraduate courses in Economics taught by tenured and assistant faculty members.

Stock insisted that despite the changes, the department will still “be able to provide a complete offering of all substantive fields at all levels.”

The Economics Department—which has one of the highest student-to-faculty ratios—introduced the 16-person courses three years ago as a result of a College-wide push to increase student interaction with faculty members.

Stock said that faculty had discussed offering two junior seminars in the next term, but ultimately concluded that it would be better to convert them to open-enrollment courses. These classes will be taught on similar course topics, but will not be restricted to the 16-student limit of junior seminars.

Demand for the small-sized courses remained high this semester. Ninety-seven of the 238 junior economics concentrators entered a lottery for 48 slots, according to Jeana Lee, an undergraduate course assistant for the department.

The final decision on junior seminars was announced in yesterday’s monthly e-mail to concentrators.

The newsletter also said that sophomore tutorials—mandatory, small-sized courses which are taught by teaching assistants—will be offered in the fall as well as the spring. According to Director of Undergraduate Studies Jeffrey A. Miron, the addition of fall tutorials is intended to “give students a little more flexibility,” and is not an expansion of the program.

The newsletter concluded its announcement on junior seminars with a request for its undergraduate students: “Please complain to your local dean that the Economics Department needs more faculty!”

—Staff writer Noah S. Rayman can be reached at nrayman@fas.harvard.edu.