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Econ: Number Crunching
Do college intro-economics courses need a
‘more balanced perspective’?
Article reprinted from Newsweek,
March 24, 2003
When protest groups have economists on their side,
numbers carry a lot of clout. At Harvard, a determined
band of students has petitioned to diversify the core
curriculum taught by former Reagan economics czar
Martin Feldstein. Already 600 undergrads have signed,
arguing that rival professor Stephen Marglin should
teach an alternative class that provides the college’s
800 intro-to-econ students with a “more balanced
perspective.” The department votes in April.
The debate is not just raging in Cambridge,
where students are famous for tussling with administrators.
Neva Goodwin, a Tufts scholar, is
working on a Houghton Mifflin-commissioned basic-econ
text that will include feminist and ecological points
of view while questioning the assumptions of neoclassical
econ. “One chair at another university said
to me, ‘Our students hate us’,”
Goodwin said when asked why she’s writing the
book. Goodwin’s tome won’t hit stores
for months, but has generated so much buzz that she
regularly receives e-mails from profs around the country
begging to borrow chapters.
There’s even a controversy brewing
in South Bend. A proposed split of the Notre Dame
econ department has caused an uproar because the Roman
Catholic university has long been a bastion of social-justice
economics, and the long-dominant Marxists fear being
marginalized. After Wednesday’s vote, either
Adam Smith or Karl Marx will likely be rolling in
his grave.
—Suzanne Smalley
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