Category: Economists

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Columbia Economists Gender Social Work Socialism

Columbia. Economics Ph.D. Alumna, Vera Shlakman, 1938

 

Vera Shlakman (1909-2017) was born in Montreal to an anarchist mother and social-democratic father, Jewish immigrants born in Vilna and Pinsk, respectively, who named their children after Eleanor Marx, Victor Hugo and the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich. “Whenever Emma Goldman and Rudolf Rocker came to Montreal to lecture they stayed with us.”

Vera and her siblings all studied at McGill University but then moved to New York to find jobs. Vera did her Ph.D. thesis work with the economic historian Carter Goodrich at Columbia University. Later at Smith College she worked together with, among other people, Dorothy Douglas (divorced from the economist and later U.S. Senator, Paul Douglas).

Vera Shlakman’s career as an economist was cut short in 1952 as a consequence of the Second Red Scare. She was later rehabilitated and actually received financial compensation for lost pension rights. Of no small interest are the recollections  of the eminent historian of economics, Mark Blaug, included below.

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Biographical information for Vera Shlakman

Heins, Marjorie. Priests of Our Democracy–The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. “Vera Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (1935).” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 69 (2006): 195-200.

Avrich, Paul. Interview with Lena Shlakman, January 23 and 24, 1974, in Anarchist Voices. A Oral History of Anarchism in America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Pages 325-328.

Vera Shlakman’s New York Times obituary, “Vera Shlakman, Fired in Red Scare, Dies at 108” was published November 29, 2017.

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Timeline of Vera Shlakman

1909. Born July 15 in Montreal to Louis Shlakman (tailor and shirtwaist factory foreman) and Lena Hendler (glove stitching, shirtwaist factory worker).

1930. B.A. in economics from McGill University in Montreal.

1931. M.A. in economics from McGill University.

1931/32-1932/33. In residence graduate work at Columbia University. Some months employed as research assistant to Professor Arthur R. Burns.

1933/34-1934-35.  Research Fellow to the Council of Industrial Studies, Smith College.

1935. Publishes Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts as volume 20, Nos. 1-4 (October, 1934-July, 1935)  of the Smith College Studies in History.

Pasted on the title page: “Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University.”

1935-37. Instructor in the Department of Economics, Smith College.

1937-38. Instructor in the Department of Economics and Sociology at Sweet Briar College, Virginia.

1938. Ph.D. in economics awarded by Columbia University.

1938. Hired by Queens College as instructor.

1944-46. Reported to have been a member of the Communist Party. One of the reasons why the F.B.I. had placed her on a watch list. [Not aware of any record in which Shlakman had ever confirmed or denied such activity.]

1952. Assistant professor, but summoned as vice-president of the Teachers Union local for a public hearing of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. After taking the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination in response to questions regarding  Communist Party activity, she (along with several others) was dismissed from Queens College.

1953. Unemployed.

1954-58.  Employed as a secretary and bookkeeper with some intermittent teaching.

1959. Hired for an administrative position at Adelphi University.

1960. Teaching position in Social Work at Adelphi University, achieved rank of associate professor..

1966. Hired at the School of Social Work at Columbia University, Associate professor.

1967-68. Supreme Court of the United States declares the New York state laws under which Shlakman and others were dismissed as unconstitutional.

1978. Retired from Columbia University as professor emerita.

1980. Official apology received from City University of New York.

1982. Trustees of the City University announced a financial settlement for its dismissed faculty. Vera Shlakman received $114,599.

2017. Vera Shlakman died November 5 in Manhattan.

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AEA Listing 1938

Shlakman, Vera, Queen’s Col., Flushing, N.Y. (1938) a Queen’s Col., instr. b B:A:, 1930, M.A., 1931, McGill (Canada); Ph.D., 1938, Columbia. c Economic history of factory town: study of Chicopee, Mass. d American economic history; labor.

Source: American Economic Review, Vol. 28, No. 3, Supplement, Handbook, Who’s Who in the American Economic Association: 1938 (Sep., 1938). List of Members, p. 83.

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Testimony by the Historian of Economics, Mark Blaug

I doubt whether it would have taken me so many years to throw off the weight of Marxism if it had not been for an encounter in 1952 with the spectre of McCarthyism. McCarthy was riding high in 1952, the product of the anti-Communist hysteria that held America in its grip at the height of the Cold War. And it was a hysteria as the following story will show. I had graduated from Queens College of the City University of New York in 1950 and was in the midst of my preliminary year for the PhD at Columbia University when Arthur D. Gayer, the chairman of the economics department at Queens College, was killed in an automobile accident. The department looked around for someone to take over his courses in the middle of the semester and since I had worked for him as a research assistant, I was asked whether I would have a go. And so I suddenly found myself teaching a full load of courses in microeconomics, consumer economics and marketing, a subject I had never studied. I can remember being so nervous about my first lectures that I literally memorized them in their entirety the night before giving them.

I was just getting on top of all this teaching when the Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy, arrived in New York city to investigate communism in the New York City college system. They called on three well-known professors to appear before them in order, no doubt, to ask them the familiar questions: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”. All three refused to cooperate with the committee, pleading the First and Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits witnesses from incriminating themselves. Despite the fact that all three were tenured professors, they were promptly and summarily dismissed by their employer, the City University of New York.
One of these three professors was Vera Shlakman, Professor of Labour Economics at Queens College, a former teacher of mine and, at that point in time, a colleague. She was the president of the Teachers’ Union, a left-wing professional union of college teachers in the New York City area, and was herself left-wing and, for all I knew, a fellow-traveler. But having been taught by her, I knew that she was scrupulously impartial and leaned over back wards not to indoctrinate her students. A number of students organized a petition to the President of Queens College demanding Vera Shlakman’s reinstatement but, by the by-laws of the college, student petitions could not be submitted to a higher authority without an endorsing signature of at least one faculty member. The students went right through the economics department, which then numbered 40 professors, associate professors, assistant professors, and lowly tutors like myself, without encountering one person willing to endorse the petition. At the end of the line, they came to me and because of my personal regard for Professor Shlakman, and because I could not bear the thought of being pusillanimous, I signed the petition. Within 24 hours, I received a curt note from President Thatcher of Queens College (odd that I should remember his name after 40 years!) informing me that, unless I resigned forthwith, I would be dismissed, and black-listed for future employment.
For a day or two, I contemplated a magnifi cent protest, a statement that would ring down the ages as a clarion call to individual freedom, that would be read and recited for years to come by American high school students?and then I quietly sent in my letter of resignation.

I was now at my wit’s end. I had planned to apply for a scholarship to begin working on my doctoral dissertation and had been relying on my teaching salary from Queens College to carry me through the application period. I was broke and depressed by the entire experience when suddenly the telephone rang to inform me that I had been offered a grant by the Social Science Research Council to enable me to go abroad to write my PhD thesis: clearly, there were people here and there behind the scenes lending assistance to victims of McCarthyism.

Source: Mark Blaug, Not Only an Economist—Autobiographical Reflections of a Historian of Economic Thought, The American Economist, Fall, 1994, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Fall, 1994), pp. 14-15.

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Oscar Shaftel Papers

The Oscar Shaftel Collection documents Professor Shaftel’s tenure as a professor at Queens College, including his dismissal and his efforts to reinstate his pension. The bulk of the collection is from 1948 to 1982 and includes correspondence, flyers, printed materials, and hearing transcripts. The collection provides evidence of Oscar Shaftel’s personal experience at Queens College, as well as student activism on campus in the late 1940s and early 1950s. More broadly, the collection provides documentation of the McCarthyism and its effect on the New York City education system.

This series includes correspondence from Queens College President John T. Theobald (1953); a copy of the transcript from Oscar Shaftel’s testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee; correspondence regarding Shaftel’s appeal of his termination by Queens College; testimony of former Queens College professor Vera Shlankman; court documents of former professors Dudley Straus and Francis Thompson (undated); and a letter written in support of Vera Shlankman and Oscar Shaftel from Queens College alumni.

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Image Source:  Faculty portrait of Vera Shlakman, Social Work. Alephi University (Garden City, New York), The Oracle 1965.

 

 

Categories
Economists Harvard Policy

Harvard. Paul Volcker’s A.M. Transcript for Graduate School of Public Administration, 1949-1951

 

Paul Volcker’s entry into Economics in the Rear-view Mirror was celebrated as the 45th member of the tongue-in-cheek page “Economists Wearing Bowties”.  

But seriously now, Paul Volcker’s biographer, William L. Silver (Volcker The Triumph of Persistence, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), included an image of a hand-written copy of Paul Volcker’s Harvard University A.M. course transcript that I  have transcribed into a digital artifact for this post. Two Volcker quotes from the book have been added to show the power of academic scribblers from a few years back (and not necessarily in a good way) to provoke frenzy in the minds of those in authority. 

Incidentally, for a couple of the courses Economics in the Rear-view Mirror already provides copies of the course outlines, reading lists, and final exams (see below for links).

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Too late for a tuition refund
(from Princeton)

“I don’t think I heard the name of John Maynard Keynes until I got to Harvard. At Princeton they taught the famous quantity theory of money as though they heard it directly from David Hume in 1750….Friedrich Lutz was about forty at the time, but from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old, he might as well have been two hundred and forty. He taught us that too much money created inflation.”

Source: William L. Silber, Volcker The Triumph of Persistence, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012, pp. 33-34.

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But what if your detector is defective?

“Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down.”

Ernest Hemingway 1954

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Volcker recalling Roosa’s arranging a presidential appointment for him as deputy undersecretary of the treasury for monetary affairs so that he could serve as Treasury’s point man in confronting the [Kennedy Administration’s] CEA:

“It all sounded too easy. Push this button twice and out pops full employment. Equations do not work as well on people as they do on rocket. I remember sitting in class at Harvard listening to [the fiscal policy expert] Arthur Smithies say, ‘A little inflation is good for the economy.’ And all I can remember after that was a word flashing in my brain like a yellow caution sign: ‘Bullshit.’ I’m not sure exactly where that came from…but it’s a thought that never left me.”

Source: “William L. Silber, Volcker The Triumph of Persistence, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012, pp. 33-34.

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Handwritten copy of Volcker’s
Harvard transcript:

Harvard University. Graduate School of Public Administration
Littauer Center, Cambridge, Mass.

July 26, 1951.

Transcript of Harvard Record of Paul Adolph Volcker

Course

 Grade
½ Course

Full Course
1949-50

Ec. 201

 Economic Theory A
Ec. 241 Principles of Money and Banking

A-

Ec. 243a

 International Trade A

Gov. 250a

Govt. Admin. & Public Policy

A

Ec. 243b

 International Trade A

Gov. 250b

 Govt. Admin. & Public Policy A-
1950-51

Gov. 106b

 History of Political Thought A
Ec 202 Advanced Economic Theory

Excused

Ec. 251

 Public Finance A
Ec. 350 Reading & Research/half
Prof. Hansen

Satisfactory

Gov. 300

 Reading & Research/half
Prof. Fainsod		 Satisfactory

 
Gov. 300 Reading & Research/half
Prof. Neumanns

Satisfactory

Degree awarded: A.M., Harvard Univ., June 1951

The established grades are A, B, C, D, and E.

A grade of A, B, Credit, Satisfactory or Excused indicates that the course was passed with distinction. Only courses passed with distinction may be credited toward a higher degree.

Robert G. McCloskey
Secretary

Source: Image from William L. Silber, Volcker — The Triumph of Persistence, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012, p. 308.

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Volcker’s Harvard Course Instructors

1949-50

Ec 201. Economic Theory. Professor Chamberlin.

Ec 241. Principles of Money and Banking. Professor J. H. Williams (Fall); Professor Hansen (Spring).

Ec 243a. International Trade. Professor Haberler.

Ec 243b. International Economic Policy. Professors Haberler and Smithies.

Gov 250a. Government Administration and Policy. Professor Fainsod.

Gov 250b. Government Administration and Policy.  Professor Gaus.

1950-51

Ec 251. Public Finance. Professor Burbank.

Gov 106b. History of Political Thought II. Probably Prof. Friedrichs.

Source: Harvard University. Report of the President of Harvard College, 1949-1950. [Note: course enrollment information was not provided in the President’s Report for 1950-51.]

 

Image Source: 2020 Princeton Reunions Virtual Talk: Honoring the Remarkable Legacy of Paul Volcker ’49.

Categories
Economists Harvard Teaching Undergraduate

Harvard. Political Economy à la Francis Bowen, 1870

From time to time one digs up a nugget in the secondary literature that deserves its own post. Harvard President Charles W. Eliot (from 1869 to 1909), an advocate of putting more political economy into the curriculum, trash talks the quality of economics instruction when he took office.

Here two textbooks that had been inflicted upon Harvard College students in the pre-Dunbar days.

Francis Bowen (1856). The Principles of Political Economy Applied to the Condition, the Resources, and the Institutions of the American People. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1856.

Francis Bowen (1870). American Political Economy, including Strictures on the Management of the Currency and the Finances since 1861. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

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Harvard’s retired president,
Charles W. Eliot, looking back at economics instruction à la Bowen

In respect to the teaching of political economy, or economics, I can perhaps give you some notion of the great change which has taken place since 1869 by describing the work done by Professor Francis Bowen, the only Harvard professor who then dealt at all with the subject of political economy. He gave only about a quarter of his time to that subject, because he had so many other subjects to deal with. His idea of teaching political economy was to write an elementary book on the subject, and to require the senior class — it was a required subject of the senior year — to read that book. He gave no lectures; he sometimes commented upon those pages of the book which had been assigned as the lesson of the day, to be repeated in the recitation room by those students who had studied the lesson. It is a long way from that condition of things to the present organization of the Department of Economics.

Source:  Charles William Eliot (1923), Harvard Memories. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 70-71.

Image Source: Harvard University. Hollis Images. Portrait (1891) of Francis Bowen by Edwin Tryon Billings.

 

Categories
Chicago Economics Programs Economists Faculty Regulations Graduate Student Support

Chicago. H. Gregg Lewis proposes a “labor laboratory”. Ca. early 1950s.

 

Thanks to a prompt from Beatrice Cherrier (a.k.a. Twitter’s undercoverhist), I have transcribed the following documents found together in the economics department records in the University of Chicago archives. We catch a glimpse of H. Gregg Lewis’ early vision of a “labor laboratory” for the training of budding labor economists in the craft of empirical economic research. Serendipitously we also discover the deep self-doubt plaguing Lewis that he shared with the chair of his department at the time, T. W. Schultz.

For much more on Chicago’s workshop system, see:

Ross Emmett.” Sharpening Tools in the Workshop: The Workshop System and the Chicago School’s Success” in Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program,  pp. 93-115, Robert van Horn, Philip Mirowski and Thomas Stapleford, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2011. ​There may be slight differences between the published version of the paper and the one on SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1014015

In preparing this post I found the following testimony of a former student of Lewis who went on to a most distinguished career in labor economics (who also happens to have taught my daughter an honors undergraduate class in statistics at the University of Texas).

Daniel S. Hamermesh. H. Gregg Lewis: Perhaps the Father of Modern Labor Economics. IZA Discussion Paper No. 13551, July 2020.

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Four page handwritten letter by H. Gregg Lewis to T. W. Schultz
(undated, early 1950s)

PRIVATE

To: T. W. Schultz
From: H. G. Lewis

Some time before the end of this quarter I’d like to sit down with you for an unrushed hour or so to discuss some problems, personal ones, and to receive your counsel.

What has brought the discussion “to a head” is my wish to experiment teaching labor economics along the “laboratory” lines I sketched in an earlier memorandum. (I submit a proposal to that end below.) However, I think there is little virtue and, perhaps, much painful effort in conducting such an experiment unless I have reasonable prospects of continuing the experiment beyond next year. And that has raised the whole question of my future at the University. The problem is not mainly my lack of tenure or the recent freeze on tenure appointments, though these are not irrelevant. Indeed, the purpose of this discussion is not to raise the issue of the Department’s assessment of my work, but my own assessment of myself and what is good for me.

It is difficult to convey to you what the nature of my problem is, since I’m not sure of it myself. In substance it is in [illegible word] aspects loss of self-confidence, demoralization and high tension.

Prior to 1945, I was full of confidence, though I think never very cocky or very self-assured. But in the post-war years my confidence has been continuously slipping. In the last two years particularly, I have felt demoralized, incompetent as an economist, unprepared to say or to write anything that I felt could stand the test of critical examination. Altogether it seems up to an estimate that I’m really [new page] [first word lost/truncated through stapling] … the Department. (My colleagues have been generous to me in attributing my low productivity to Departmental “busy” work. Though I sometimes feel “burdened” by that “busy” work, it’s not the real reason for my low output.)

The demoralization has not been [illegible word] intervals [illegible word] confidence returned. Indeed I do not really feel that I am a shame to the profession, though, I’m not ready to belong in the company of my Chicago colleagues.

I do not know quite what it is that has put me in this unproductive state of mind. Part of it is surely a better realization of my own worth. And sometimes, I attribute much of the trouble to an environment of colleagues who are, on my view, my own superiors. I have learned much from them and stand to learn more if, I should stay. Furthermore, I’m not at all certain that my morale would be improved by a change of environment.

If, I were to stay, I should like to begin an experiment next year (Winter and Spring quarters) with a “laboratory in labor economics.” Although, I’m less enthusiastic about the idea than I was several weeks ago, I still want to give the experiment a good try. (My loss of enthusiasm stems from the fairly cool reception the idea has had from several of my colleagues. They fear[?] that though the laboratory may be unctuous[?] for students, it will prevent its supervisor from doing his own productive research.)

In its negative aspect the proposal involves releasing me from my present duties. Given somewhat smaller enrollment next year, the dropping of a section of Econ 209 and one of Soc. Sci. 200A would not require funds for replacement teaching. Relieving me of an assortment of busy work distractions is [new page] another matter. I am not confident that I could give the laboratory a fair trial while carrying on these busy activities. At the same time I do not want these activities added to those my colleagues already carry. Some replacement funds — from the Ford grant — appear to be necessary therefore.

On the positive side, I would replace these duties with full-time devotion intimate teaching of a few (a half-dozen or so) students who have reached the A.M. level and beyond. I would plan to be engaged with the students, heavily in research. The students admitted to the laboratory would commit themselves to full-time work in it for at least two consecutive quarters. (They would receive their instruction by example, by reading and research and by intimate conferences with their fellows including their supervisor. Progress would be tested by oral and written examinations, papers, and reports. The laboratory would be open to students who had “completed” their theory training and who [illegible word] to do supervised reading and research in labor economics.

The laboratory would make positive demands for resources at the very minimum for desk and conference space for the students and some clerical aid. It seems desirable to me also to provide subsidies of at least tuition to the student members in order to provide an incentive for them to remain in school while doing research. In addition, I should like to bring to the laboratory at least one more mature[?] young economist for a year of research.

In summary the following are the resource demands of the laboratory:

[new page]

  1. Some replacement funds to provide for the services from which I would be released
  2. Desk and conference space for the laboratory and some typing assistance from Social Science typing resources
  3. Six tuition scholarships
  4. A research assistant for three quarters at a negotiated salary of some $4000 to $5,000

I have not made a request for funds for this purpose from the [illegible word, beginning with “D”] since these are matters that go beyond my own private[?] interest.

 

Source: The University of Chicago Archives. Department of Economics. Records. Box 41, Folder 1.

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Typed memo regarding training graduate students as “scientific craftsmen”

[Penciled note] From Gregg Lewis

I have been discomfited for some time by the belief that graduate faculties of economics generally are neglecting their responsibilities for making economics an effective science and for training their students as scientific craftsmen. I think we do as well as can be expected as moral philosophers and teachers of moral philosophy. Some of us—Knight is our shining example—do exceedingly well indeed. But most of us and most of our students are not made of the stuff that makes for good moral philosophers. Nevertheless, we expend a large part of our energies in that direction and encourage our students to imitate us. This is clearly a misfortune for economic science, and probably also for moral philosophy, if the Knight-Gresham Law of Talk is correct.

Meanwhile, economics as a science languishes. Most of us cultivate the whole field of economic ideas indiscriminately, the useless and misleading along with the useful. And we plant new ideas with the same nice regard for the weeds among them. Thus, each new generation of economists faces a more and more formidable task of weeding. The weeds become more abundant, their roots deeper.

We are not in want of good reasons for making a science of economics. True, the problems of economic planning that are surely the central ones for economic science do have moral content. And, unfortunately it is easy to make practically every controversy on economic policy sound as though it turned solely on a question of morals. The plain fact of the matter, however, is that the really hard core of our disagreements is not in the differences of moral beliefs but in differences of beliefs about economic facts.

That many of us have no real capacity for moral philosophy of course does not mean that we are prepared to be good scientists. Most of us, even if your spirits are willing, will have to struggle hard to overcome our slatternly research habits and to learn scientific skills and “instincts of workmanship.” But that is no excuse for making the effort. For unless we do, our students will be as ill-prepared as we are.

The problem of building a science, of course will not be solved merely by a formal reorganization of graduate instruction. But I think reorganization will help. The example which has guided the proposed reorganization I set forth below is the experimental laboratory of the natural sciences.

“Each professor—whether of money and banking, business cycles, public finance, or what not—will have his own laboratory. He will have one or two assistants who would share responsibility for the laboratory, and other assistants needed. The students (doctoral candidates) in a certain subject will get their training in the laboratory, by working on some project. The individual assignments will be of limited scope, but will be the function of the professor in charge to see that they fit together. The projects will grow out of the research program of the laboratory and will be supervised closely.
There would be no regimentation of the laboratory directors, any more than there is of professors in a well-run university.*
[footnote] *From a letter written by Arthur F. Burns who suggested the idea to me.

It would not be mandatory for any professor to direct such a laboratory, but if he chose to do so, he would be relieved largely from other duties and would be responsible for conducting the affairs of the laboratory continuously and full time. Nor would graduate students in all fields be required (for the Ph.D. degree) to participate in a laboratory project. Those who elected to do so, however, would commit themselves full-time for a period of something like an academic year.

Establishment of such laboratories by a considerable proportion of our faculty would call for a reduction of our student load per faculty member. This can be accomplished in substantial part I think by drastically reducing the number of students who plan to have the A.M. their terminal degree. And this is something I favor, reorganization or not.

Space problems are sure to arise but I do not think they need to be nor will prove to be insoluble.

THE MAIN FEATURES OF THE PROPOSAL

  1. The proposed program of graduate study, I believe, does not conflict in any way with Divisional degree requirements and hence would require no special dispensation by Divisional authorities.
  2. All candidates for the A.M. and Ph.D. degrees normally would obtain the Master’s Degree, after three or four quarters (beyond the four-year A.B.) of full-time participation in lecture courses, and by a route fairly similar to that of our present “Alternative” Master’s degree. The Master’s thesis would be dispensed with, the Master’s degree treated as an undergraduate or non-research degree, and students interested only in the A.M. degree discouraged from applying for admission.
    The obtaining of the Master’s degree would be the principle requirement for admission to graduate study.
  3. Faculty members would be given the free choice of devoting their scholastic energies as most of them do now or of conducting the kind of laboratory described above.
  4. Students admitted to graduate study for the Ph.D. degree would have two alternatives open to them.
    1. Taking graduate courses as they do now principally in “non-laboratory” fields, leading to a preliminary examination or examinations and the satisfaction of “distribution” requirements.
    2. Participating full-time for three quarters in a laboratory leading to the preparation of a paper or papers which would be a prerequisite for admission to Ph.D. candidacy.
  5. The recently passed procedure for admission, writing of thesis, and final Ph.D. examination would not be changed.

 

THE PROPOSED DEGREE REQUIREMENTS:

  1. For the A.M. Degree:
    1. The Divisional requirements
    2. The qualifying examination covering the subject matter of Economics 209, 211 or Social Science 200A, 220 or 222, 230.
    3. The Field Examinations: (Required of all candidates)
      1. Economic Principles: (Required of all candidates)
        This examination would be essentially the same as the present Ph.D. “Theory” prelim, including monetary theory. In terms of present courses, preparation for the examination normally would mean taking the following courses: 300A, 300B, 302, 330, 335.
      2. Statistics: (Required of all candidates)
        Essentially the present prelim covering 311, 312, 313 or 316 or equivalents.
    4. Economics electives: Course credit or examination in a balance of courses sufficient to bring the total registration in Economics to 15 courses. Normally the balance would amount to four courses.
  2. For Admission to Graduate Study:
    1. The A.M. degree above or its equivalent.
    2. Satisfaction of the high level language requirement
  3. Program of Graduate Study
    1. Three quarters of full-time residence in an economics laboratory leading to a paper or papers approved by the laboratory director or
    2. Passing a preliminary examination in a third field (a field other than Principles or Statistics) and satisfaction of the distribution requirement. Normally this would require a full academic year.

Source: The University of Chicago Archives. Department of Economics. Records. Box 41, Folder 1.

Images:  University of Chicago Photographic Archive, H. Gregg Lewis [apf1-03861] and T. W. Schultz [apf1-07479], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Categories
Columbia Economists Gender Social Work Third Party Funding Vassar

Columbia. Economics Ph.D. alumna, Sydnor Harbison Walker, 1926

 

Sydnor Harbison Walker was a budding labor economist who became an important grants administrator/manager with the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and later the Rockefeller Foundation. Her 1926 Columbia University dissertation was on the economics of social work, which like home economics, provided an academic harbor within economics for not a few women economists of the time.

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Life of Sydnor Harbison Walker

Born: 26 September 1891 in Louisville, Kentucky.

Parents: Walter and Mary Sydnor Perkins Walker.

1913. A.B. from Vassar with honors

Taught English and Latin at private schools in Louisville, Dallas, and Los Angeles.

1917. M.A. University of Southern California.

Thesis: “The General Strike with Particular Reference to Its Practicability as Applied to American Labor Conditions”

1917. Poughkeepsie City director listing as “assistant Vassar College”.

1918-19. Poughkeepsie City director listing as “instructor Vassar College”.

1919-21 [ca.]. Philadelphia.

Personnel work at Scott Company in Philadelphia [where she met Beardsley Ruml, see below].
Personnel work at Strawbridge & Clothier in Philadelphia.

1921-23. American Friends Service Committee.

One year of relief work in Vienna
Followed by one year in Russia with the American Friends Service Committee.

1924-1929. Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund.

Recruited by Beardsley Ruml as “research associate” in June 1924.

1926. Economics Ph.D. from Columbia University. Henry Seager, principal adviser.

Dissertation published: Social Work and the Training of Social Workers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1928.

1929-1943. Rockefeller Foundation (absorbed the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund in 1929).

1933. Promoted to associate director

1934. Sydnor H. Walker, “Privately Supported Social Work,” in Recent Social Trends in the United States, ed. President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: Whittlesey House, 1934), pp. 1168-1223.

1937. Appointment to acting director of the Social Science Division.

1939. Voted to the board of trustees of Vassar. Resigned October 1942 due to illness.

1941. October. Contracted a spinal infection, involving a paralytic illness that “permanently confined her to a wheel chair”. She had been elected to be president “of a prominent woman’s college” but the illness forced her to decline the honor.

1943. Resigned from the Rockefeller Foundation.

1945. Edited a volume for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, New York City. “The first one hundred days of the atomic age, August 6-November 15, 1945”.

1948. Appointed assistant to Sarah Blanding, president of Vassar.

1958. Retired from Vassar.

Died: 12 December 1966 in Millbrook, New York, leaving a bequest of $10,000 to Vassar College.

_____________________

Walker’s principal biographer

Amy E. Wells. Considering Her Influence: Sydnor H. Walker and Rockefeller Support for Social Work, Social Scientists, and Universities in the South.  pp. 127-147. Chapter 5 in Andrea Walton (ed.). Women and Philanthropy in Education.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

_________. Sydnor Harbison Walker. American National Biography Online. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

_____________________

Vassar Memorial Minute
Walker, Sydnor Harbison, 1891-1966

Miss Sydnor Harbison Walker, Vassar alumna, faculty member, trustee and Assistant to the President, died December 12, 1966, at her home in Millbrook, New York, at the age of 75. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of Walter and Mary Sydnor Perkins Walker.

After attending Louisville schools, Miss Walker came to Vassar and was graduated in 1913 with honors. Economics was her major interest and she returned to Vassar to teach it in 1917, with an M.A. from the University of Southern California. Professor Emeritus Mabel Newcomer, a young colleague at the time, writes that “her quick wit and gaiety made her well liked among students in the residential hall where she lived ….. as a teacher she exhibited these same qualities, combined with clarity of thought and expression …. although she could be sharply critical of the careless and the dilatory.”

In 1919 Miss Walker decided that she needed some practical experience and went to work for a pioneering firm of industrial relations consultants where she wrote their weekly news letter. Three members of this young firm became college presidents and some years later Miss Walker herself was on the way to the presidency of a prominent college for women. A fourth member of the firm was Beardsley Ruml.

In 1921 Miss Walker engaged in the relief work of the American Friends Service Committee, first in Vienna and later in Russia. In a letter to President Emeritus MacCracken, she vividly describes her experience.

“We are now feeding about 15,000 a week through our depots, and we are supplying clothing to nearly 3,000. Our work is done on an individual case basis, which we think to be the soundest, not only from a social point of view, but because we believe that method essential for the creation of a spirit of international good-will — at no time a secondary object in our program… In addition to the feeding and clothing…. we are teaching mothers to care for their babies through the welfare centers; we are supporting a score of hospitals and other institutions for children; we have restocked farms with poultry and cattle and are helping farmers to build up permanent food resources for the city; and we are assisting materially in such constructive Austrian enterprises as the building of suburban land settlements and the creation of a market abroad for the art work of many gifted persons…we feel that we are a real part of the life of the city and not a superimposed group of relief workers.”

It is not hard for those who knew Miss Walker to visualize her presiding over relief work in the Imperial Palace of the Hofburg, whose stately corridors were cheerless and deserted save for these activities.

Returning to America in 1924, Miss Walker combined her interests in industrial relations with social welfare and education by becoming a research assistant at the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund in New York. In the meantime she received her doctorate in economics from Columbia University in 1928 with a dissertation on “Social Work and the Training of Social Workers.”

When the Rockefeller Foundation absorbed the Spelman Fund in 1929, Miss Walker began her association of twenty years with the Foundation. She moved from the research department to the position of Associate Director of the Social Sciences Division and finally became its Acting Director. While there she developed a program of international relations involving considerable travel in Europe and South America in very responsible positions. In 1933 she collaborated in the preparation of the report of President Hoover’s Committee on Social Trends, contributing a chapter entitled, “Privately Supported Social Work.”

In 1939 Miss Walker was proposed for trustee of Vassar College by the Faculty Club and she was elected by the board. Again quoting Miss Newcomer, “her contribution as a Vassar trustee was very real….Her experience on the faculty and as a student, and her current work in the Rockefeller Foundation, had given her a real understanding of the problems of the college and enabled her to offer constructive criticism and suggestion for change.”

Her resignation as trustee occurred in October 1942, and came because of a crippling illness which led eventually to her permanent confinement to a wheel chair. A friend and fellow alumna described her long battle against mistaken diagnoses, official predictions of helplessness and the end of her career.

“Sydnor simply rejected the idea of permanent immobility…. for a person who never knew what fatigue meant, who never could understand inactivity, either mental or physical, nothing could have been more tragic than paralysis.”

When Miss Walker realized that complete recovery was impossible, on her own initiative she went to one of the first rehabilitation clinics in New York and learned to help herself to a remarkable degree. Also she wrote, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation published in 1945, a report entitled “The First Hundred Days of the Atomic Age.”

In 1948 another opportunity to serve Vassar came to Miss Walker when Miss Blanding named her Assistant to the President. She returned to live in Metcalf House and became an active participant in Vassar’s development. Miss Blanding knew her as “a brilliant woman who never lost her zest for life nor her interest in things of the mind. She was a voracious reader and stimulating companion.”

After Miss Walker’s retirement in 1957, she bought a large colonial house in Millbrook, reminiscent of her native Kentucky. There she continued her vital interest in Vassar and in the many friendships she had made throughout her rich and colorful life.

Respectfully submitted,

Josephine Gleason
Clarice Pennock
Verna Spicer
Winifred Asprey, Chairman

Source: Online collection published by Vassar College Libraries. Faculty meeting minutes: XVIII-334-336.

_____________________

From The Rockefeller Foundation: A Digital History.

Sydnor H. Walker worked with the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) and the Rockefeller Foundation’s (RF) Division of the Social Sciences, helping to shape research in the social sciences over the course of two decades.

Walker was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1891. She received an A.B. in economics from Vassar College in 1913 and an M.A. from the University of Southern California in 1917.

She returned to Vassar in 1917, where she served as an instructor in economics. A colleague commented that Walker was appreciated by the students for “her quick wit and gaiety…although she could be sharply critical of the careless and the dilatory.”[1] In 1919 Walker left her teaching position to join an industrial relations consulting firm headed by Beardsley Ruml. She subsequently went abroad to Vienna and Russia to aid in European relief with the American Friends Service Committee.

Upon her return to the U.S. in 1924, Walker was recruited by Ruml to work for the LSRM as a research associate. She was a staunch advocate of using scientific and standardized methods to conduct research in the social sciences. While working for the LSRM, Walker continued her studies at Columbia University, receiving her Ph.D. in economics in 1928. Her dissertation, “Social Work and the Training of Social Workers,” was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1928.

When many of LSRM’s programs were consolidated with the RF in 1929 and a new Division of the Social Sciences created, Walker became Assistant Director of the division. She was promoted to Associate Director in 1933 and Acting Director in 1937. Among her interests at the RF, she was a proponent of improving the teaching of social work and the administration of social welfare programs. Her grant-making extended to many southern universities. She also contributed to the development of the social sciences outside the U.S., working with grantees in Europe and Latin America.

Resigning from the RF in 1943 for health reasons, she worked on a report for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, “The First Hundred Days of the Atomic Age,” which was published in 1945.

She served as a trustee for Vassar College from 1939-1943 and was appointed assistant to the president of Vassar College in 1948, a position she held until 1957.

Sydnor H. Walker passed away in 1966. Former Vassar College President, Sarah Blanding, called her “a brilliant woman who never lost her zest for life nor her interest in things of the mind.”[2] Her officer diaries are available to researchers at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) and additional papers are in the Biographical Collection at the Vassar College Libraries.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

[1] Josephine Gleason et al. “Sydnor Harrison Walker: A Memorial Minute,” Vassar Faculty Meeting, December 1966, Biographical Files Collection, Vassar College Archives, Vassar Libraries.

[2] Gleason et al.

Source: Webpage, The Rockefeller Foundation: A Digital History. People/Sydnor H. Walker. Also the source for the portrait of Sydnor H. Walker used above.

 

Categories
Berkeley Economists Harvard Princeton

Harvard. Economics Ph.D. Alumnus, Merton Kirk Cameron, 1921

 

After graduating from Princeton, Merton K. Cameron taught high-school Latin, Greek and History before going on for graduate work in economic history at Harvard University where he co-taught courses in the economics of transportation and the economics corporations with Professor William Z. Ripley in 1915-16.

From his obituary in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (23 May 1952, p. 5) we learn that he retired from the University of Hawaii in August, 1949 because of ill health and then moved with his family to California. It was reported that Cameron was “a member of the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce, Phi Gamma Delta, American Association of University Professors, Phi Kappa Phi, Pi Gamma Mu, National Association of Cost Accountanats and the American Economics Association.”

Merton Kirk Cameron was born 7 January 1886 in Cecil County, Maryland and died 22 May 1952 in San Gabriel, California.

_________________

Harvard Economics Ph.D., 1921

Merton Kirk Cameron, A.B. (Princeton Univ.) 1908, A.M. (Harvard Univ.) 1914.

Subject, Economics. Special Field, Economic History. Thesis, “The History of Tobacco-Growing in the Ohio Valley.”
Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Oregon.

Source: Harvard University. Report of the President of Harvard College, 1920-21, p. 60.

_________________

Summer School, Berkeley 1932

Merton Kirk Cameron, Ph.D., Professor of Economics and Head of the Department of Economics and Business, University of Hawaii.

A.B., Princeton University, 1908; M.A., 1914, Ph.D., 1921, Harvard University. Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Oregon, 1920-23, Associate Professor, 1923-28; Professor of Economics, University of Hawaii, since 1928.
Author: Experience of Oregon with Popular Election and Recall of Public Service Commissioners; Some Neglected Aspects of the Problem of Poverty; The Political Pressure on the State Commissioners; Some Economic Causes of the Backward Condition in the Ante-Bellum Ohio Valley Tobacco District.

Source: University of California, Intersession and Summer Session, 1932 at Berkeley. (Officers of Administration and Instruction, Visiting Instructors), p. 4.

_________________

From the Princeton Alumni Weekly (1952)
Memorial

Merton Cameron, Ph.D., educator and author of many scientific books and articles on sociological and economic studies, died on May 22, 1952 at his home in San Gabriel, Calif. For the past 30 years prior to his retirement in 1950 he was professor of Economics and chairman of the Dept. of Economics and Business at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu. During World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he was active in defense work in Honolulu, both in directing the construction of bomb shelters and as an expert on finger prints. At that time his wife, Margaret, served in the Honolulu Office of Censorship.

Froggy, as he was affectionately known in college, elected teaching as a career, having served on the faculties of several U.S. schools including the Lanier High School in Maryland, the Donald Fraser School of Decatur, Ga. [ca. 1908], and the Riverside Military Academy at Gainesville, Ga. [ca. 1911], before accepting an offer from the University of Hawaii. He was one of those rare teachers who was not only a master of his subject but able to arouse enthusiastic response and admiration from his pupils.

Surviving in addition to his wife, Mrs. Margaret Elizabeth Sullivan Cameron, are a son, Merton K. Jr.; a daughter Edith, wife of Col. Kenneth R. Kenerick and two grandchildren, Karen J. Kenerick and Kaye Elizabeth Kenerick.

To the members of his family who survive the Class extends its sincere sympathy.

For the Class of 1908
Robert C. Clothier, President
Courtland N. Smith, Secretary

Source: Princeton Alumni Weekly, July 4, 1952, p. 34.

Image Source: University of Hawaii Yearbook, 1936.

Categories
Brookings Bryn Mawr Economists Gender Radcliffe Wisconsin

Brookings. Economics PhD Alumna, Helen Everett, 1924

 

Today we rejoin our series, “Get to Know an Economics PhD Alumna.”

Helen Meiklejohn née Everett (1891-1982) was the daughter of a Brown University philosophy professor, Walter Goodnow Everett. Helen received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr (1915), A.M. from Radcliffe (1918), and was among the first (!) PhDs awarded at Brookings (1924).

Helen Everett’s personal academic ambitions appear to have immediately taken a back seat to those of her husband, Alexander Meikeljohn, who had been a professor of philosophy and former colleague of Helen’s father at Brown. He actually knew her as a child. Before Helen and Alexander married in 1926, he had already served as Dean of Brown University (1901-1912) and as President of Amherst College (1912-1924). He was professor of philosophy at Wisconsin (1926-1938). He established the Experimental College of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1927-32). The Experimental College is considered “the forebearer of the Integrated Liberal Studies program at Wisconsin“. Alexander Meikeljohn had made a name for himself as a dynamic and passionate educational reformer and his picture was even on the cover of Time magazine (October 1, 1928). After Wisconsin’s Experimental College was closed in 1932 in no small part because of the fiscal austerity induced by the great depression, in 1938 Helen and Alexander switched full-time to his next big project for adult education, the San Francisco School of Social Studies that ended with WWII. Besides his legacy as an educational reformer, an even greater fame was achieved through his unconditional advocacy of free speech during the McCarthy era. He was selected for the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy–the award was presented by President Lyndon B. Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination.

Joseph Tussman (center) with Alec and Helen Meiklejohn, Berkeley 1961. Photo by David Tussman.

Since this is a post about Helen Everett, we move on to some details of her life and career. A casual newspaper search turned up numerous instances of Helen Meiklejohn speaking at a wide variety of progressive social and economic policy events after her marriage but the only post-marriage publication to have received any note was her chapter on pricing policy in the dress industry (see below).

_____________________

Born in Providence, R.I. on December 8, 1891 to Walter G. Everett and Harriet Mansfield Cleveland.

Died in Berkeley, CA on August 3, 1982.

_____________________

Education

1915. A.B., Bryn Mawr

1918. A. M. Radcliffe

1924. Ph.D. Robert Brookings Graduate School  of Poitics and Economics

_____________________

Employment

  • Vassar College. [1918/19(?)-1920] Instructor of Economics.
  • American Association for Labor Legislation in New York.
  • “Helen Everett left Vassar last June, worked a month as a factory worker in Cleveland in order to make reports to the Consumers’ League, and sailed in September for England, where she is studying at the London School of Economics.”
    Source: Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, 1921, p. 27.
  • Institute of Economics (Washington, D.C.) [ca. 1924-26]
  • “Helen Everett Meiklejohn, wife of Alexander Meiklejohn of the University of Wisconsin, has been added to the staff of associate editors responsible for books on economics and political science, published by W. W. Norton & Co. “
    Source: July 1, 1928. Wisconsin State Journal p. 1.
  • San Francisco School of Social Studies

“Tussman: … Now, Meiklejohn had started before the war, he had started the San Francisco school of social studies. He was a great believer in adult education. It was a free-wheeling enterprise which had classes for working people, mostly, not devoted to career stuff, just general social theory and philosophy. We read things like Veblen, a good deal. And at one point, although I was still a graduate student, he asked me to teach a couple of classes. So I would drive out with Helen, his wife, who was a PhD in economics, and very bright, and another two guys, to Santa Rosa, where once a week we taught a class in Santa Rosa, and then drove back here to Berkeley, and once a week I met a class in San Francisco. I was doing that until the war. During the war the enterprise came to an end, but it was a rather interesting quixotic venture.”
Source: Lisa Rubens, Interviews from 2004 conducted with Joseph Tussman: Philosopher, Professor, Educator. University of California. The Bancroft Library, Regional Oral History Office. Berkeley, 2012.

  • Research Economist, Consumer Needs Unit, Office of Price Administration.
    Source: The Boston Globe, 26 February 1945, p. 11.

_____________________

Foreign Travel

I.

Arrived from Plymouth on S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam in Port of New York City on November 17, 1920.

[Her passport application was dated August 24, 1920 to leave New York on the S.S. Olympic on September 18, 1920 for the purpose of study in Great Britain, France, and Italy.]

II.

[From passport application filed June 1, 1922 in Berlin, Germany]

England. July 1921 to December 1921.
France. December 1921 to May 1922.
Germany (Berlin). May 1922 to September 1922.

Return September 23, 1922 Port of N.Y.C. [travelling with her parents]

“The Class Editor [1913] had news of Helen Everett indirectly the other day. She (the c.e.) sat next to two Vassar Seniors at luncheon, who, on finding that their neighbor was a Bryn Mawr alumna, immediately asked if she knew “Miss Everett.” On replying in the affirmative a most enthusiastic account of Helen’s career as an instructor at Vassar followed, ending with an expression of deep regret that she was no longer there. Helen is studying economics in London this winter, according to these same Vassar Seniors.”
Source: Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, 1922, p. 27.

III.

Return from England (via Southampton to port of N.Y.C.) on October 23, 1925 S.S. Berengaria. [Alexander Meiklejohn travelled with her according to the ship manifest. They were married Wednesday, June 9, 1926 in Boston. (pre-honeymoon?)]

_____________________

Publications identified (to date)

Everett, Helen. 1924. The Reorganization of the British Coal Industry. Ph.D. thesis, Robert Brookings.

——. 1925. Book Review of “The Women’s Garment Workers: A History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.” American Economic Review 15(3) (September): 524–5.

——, with Isador Lubin [Lubin had been a student of Veblen’s at Missouri, had worked with Veblen at the wartime Food Administration, and with Mitchell in the Prices Section of the WIB.”]. The British Coal Dilemma. (New York, Macmillan, 1927).

——. Book Review of “A Theory of the Labor Movement” by Selig Perlman. New York: Macmillan, 1928. Social Service Review Vol. 3, No. 3 (Sept. 1929), pp. 523-525.

——. Book Review of “British Industry Today” by Ben M. Selekman and Sylvia Kopald Selekman. New York: Harper & Bros., 1929.

—— (Chapter on the dress industry), in Walton Hamilton (principal author, Gasoline industry.), Mark Adams (automobile industry), Albert Abrahamson (automobile tires), Irene Till, George Marshall (cottonseed industry) and Helen Meiklejohn. Price and Price Policies. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1938.  Vol. 7 of Reports prepared for the President’s Cabinet Committee on Price Policy.   [industries covered by other authors: whiskey and milk].

_____________________

Survived the Derailment of the Streamliner “City of San Francisco”
August 12, 1939 in Carlin, Nevada

…Mrs. Helen C. Meiklejohn, of 1525 LaLoma Avenue, Berkeley, told the same story as she smiled through bandages on her nose. Mrs. Meiklejohn, whose husband, Alexander, is connected with the University of Wisconsin, was in her berth but not asleep when the crash came.
She was thrown into the aisles, banging her nose and eyes, and then remained pinned for hours while volunteer workers tried to release her.
“I never was so glad to see anyone as I was the cowboy who finally climbed in and freed me. I had been bleeding all the while, though it wasn’t serious and I never was unconscious. The cowboys helped me climb out of the train and up to a girder to land.”

Source: Oakland Tribune, August 14, 1939, p. 3

_____________________

Helen Meiklejohn, Obituary

BERKELEY — A private family memorial service is pending for Helen Everett Meiklejohn, prominent professional economist and educator who had been a Berkeley resident since 1934.

A native of Providence R.I., Mrs. Meiklejohn died Aug. 3 [1982] in a Berkeley hospital. She was 89.

Mrs. Meiklejohn was the widow of Alexander Meiklejohn, noted educator and civil libertarian, and the youngest daughter of Walter Goodrow Everett, professor of philosophy at Brown University.

She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1915 and held advanced degrees in Economics from Radcliffe and Washington University of St Louis [Note: the Brookings PhD program was originally part of the Washington University Program]. She taught at Vassar College and worked on the staff of the Brooking Institution in Washington D.C.

She was co-author, with Isador Lubin, of “The British Coal Dilemma” and published articles in a number of professional journals.

She married Mr. Meiklejohn in 1926 and lived in Madison, Wis., for a number of years before moving to Berkeley, where she and her husband founded and taught in the San Francisco School of Social Studies. She was a member of the Council on the National Institution of Mental Health and was for many years an active participant in Planned Parenthood.

She is survived by four stepchildren, Ann Stout, of Richmond, Kenneth Meiklejohn, of Alexandria, Va., Donald Meiklejohn, of Syracuse, N.Y., and Gordon Meiklejohn, of Denver Colo., a niece, Mrs. John Nason, of Keene, N.Y., and two nephews, George and Douglas Mercer.

Source: Obituary. Helen Meiklejohn. The Berkeley Gazette (August 11, 1982), p. 2.

Categories
Economists FU-Berlin M.I.T. Popular Economics Syllabus

Paul Krugman, academic scribbles and glimpses of yore and not so yore.

 

Adam Tooze’s review of Paul Krugman’s Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics and the Fight for a Better Future (London Review of Books, Vol. 43, No. 8, 22 April 2021) has received much deserved social media acclaim.

Since you are here now looking at economics in my rear-view mirror, I thought it as good a time as any to assemble a few links from this blog and Freie Universität Berlin that go back a decade and more. Krugman’s adoring fans and fiercest critics are welcome.

__________________

Dr. h.c. FU-Berlin
(December 4, 1998)

Materials from the ceremony awarding Paul Krugman an honorary doctorate at Freie Universität Berlin are linked at this antique webpage archived by the Wayback Machine.

In case you missed the event…

Laudatio by Irwin Collier

Archived text: Original webpage (includes graphics) 

Audio recording

Paul Krugman’s award lecture: The Return of Demand Side Economics

Archived text: Original webpage

Audio recording

__________________

 “The Failure of Crisis Management”
(October 20, 2010)

Paul Krugman’s Ernst Fraenkel lecture for the John F. Kennedy Institute of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Video recording

Image Source: https://www.fu-berlin.de/campusleben/campus/2010/101022_krugman/

__________________

Transcribed Artifacts from
Economics in the Rear-view Mirror:

M.I.T. Economics Department. Graduate Student Skit: “The Wizard of E52-383C” in which Paul Krugman played the role of Paul Samuelson and was co-author (1976).

M.I.T. Economics Department. Slides, Problems Sets, Exams for Principles of Macroeconomics taught by Paul Krugman (1998).

 

Categories
Berkeley Chicago Economists Michigan

Chicago. Oscar Lange appointment as assistant professor, 1938

 

Oscar Lange’s first appointment at the University of Chicago began July 1, 1938 at the rank of assistant professor for a term of three years. This post provides a transcription of the official form submitted to the University of Chicago administration by the economics department. The brevity of the form is rather striking to those of us 21st century academics for whom a paper trail is more like an infrastructure investment.

I have also appended some information from Lange’s declaration of intention and his petition for naturalization that he filed while on the Chicago faculty. The limp indicated for his right leg is no doubt related to the differing lengths of his two legs that was noted in his selective service registration (Feb. 16, 1942), “right leg is shorter than other one.”

__________________________________

The University of Chicago

(FOR POSITIONS ABOVE THAT OF ASSISTANT)
TO BE TRANSMITTED TO THE DEAN OF FACULTIES

Date: January 31, 1938

To the Dean of Faculties:

Division of the Social Sciences. Department Economics.

The promotion/appointment of Oskar Lange to the position of

Assistant Professor is recommended, at a salary of
Four Thousand dollars ($4,000.00) beginning
July 1, 1938 for a period of Three years.

Mr. Lange has the following academic record:

A.B. (or B.S. or Ph.B.) (college) [left blank]; (year) [left blank]
Ph.D. or other higher degree (institution) LL.D., Cracow; (year) [left blank]

Previous experience in teaching:

Lecturer and Privatdozent at Cracow and Polish Free University;
one semester at Michigan; one year at California

Publications:

Partial list attached

Qualities as investigator:

Excellent

Qualities as a teacher:

Excellent. At California and Michigan said to be very successful.

Qualities as an administrator:

No knowledge.

Personality:

Good

Provision for salary:

General budget.

[signed] H. A. Millis, Chairman or head of department

The above recommendation has also been considered by Dean [signed] Robert Redfield

Further comments by Dean of Faculties: [left blank]

[signed] Emery T. Filbey, Dean of Faculties

 

PARTIAL LIST OF LANGE’S PUBLICATIONS

“Die Preisdispersion als Mittel zur statistischen Messung wirtschaftlicher Gleichgewichtsstörungen,” Veröffentlichungen der Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Konjunkturforschung (Herausgegeben von Dr. Eugen Altschul, 1932, Neue Folge Heft 4), pp. 7-56.

“Die allgemeine Interdependenz der Wirtschaftsgrössen und die Isolierungsmethode,” Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie, Band IV, Heft 1, 1932, pp. 52-78.

“The Determinateness of the Utility Function,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 1 (1933-1934), pp. 218-225.

“A Note on the Determinateness of the Utility Function,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. II (1934-1935), pp. 75-78.

“Formen der Angebotsanpassung und wirtschaftliches Gleichgewicht,” Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie, Band VI, Heft 3, 1935, pp. 358-65.

“Marxian Economics and Modern Economic Theory,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. II, No. 3, June, 1935, pp. 189-201.

“The Place of Interest in the Theory of Production,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. III, June, 1936, No. 3, pp. 159-192.

“On the Economic Theory of Socialism, Part I,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. IV, No. 1, October, 1936, pp. 53-71.

“On the Economic Theory of Socialism, Part II,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. IV, No. 2, February, 1937, pp. 123-42.

“Mr. Lerner’s Note on Socialist Economics,” Review of Economic Studies, Vol. IV, No. 2, February, 1937, pp. 143-44.

“Professor Knight’s Note on Interest Theory,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. IV, No. 3, June, 1937, pp. 231-35.

Source: University of Chicago Library. Office of the President. Hutchins Administration. Records. Box 283. Folder 10 “Economics”.

__________________________________

From Oscar Lange’s Declaration of Intention

I, OSCAR RICHARD LANGE, now residing at 5617 Dorchester Ave. [Chicago, Illinois], occupation University Professor, aged 35 years, do declare on oath that my personal description is: Sex Male, color White, complexion Fair, color of eyes Blue, color of hair Blond, height 5 feet 6 inches; weight 176 pounds; visible distinctive marks none, race Polish; nationality Polish.
I was born in Tomaszow-Mazowiecki, Poland, on July 27, 1904. I am married. The name of my wife is Irena, we were married on January 3, 1932, at Cracow, Poland; she was born at Czestochowa, Poland, on October 1, 1906, entered the United States at New York, N.Y., on Aug. 20, 1937, for permanent residence therein, and now resides with me. I have no children…

I have not heretofore made a declaration of intention….
my last foreign residence was Czestochowa, Poland.
I emigrated to the United States of America from Havre, France,
my lawful entry for permanent residence in the United States was at New York, N.Y.
under the name of Oskar-Ryszard Lange, on August 20, 1937
on the vessel [SS] Paris…

[Signed]
Oscar Richard Lange

…at Chicago, Illinois this 18th day of November, anno Domini, 1939.

 

From Petition for Naturalization
September 17, 1942

The address for the Lange family changed to 6044 Stony Island Ave., Chicago, Illinois.

Added to “Visible distinctive marks limp on rt. leg”

New member of the Lange family noted: son, Christopher, born Feb. 11, 1940, Chicago, Illinois.

The affidavit of witnesses was signed by

Professor Chester W. Wright (5747 Blackstone Ave., Chicago) and
Professor Jacob Viner (5554 Kenwood Ave., Chicago).

Source: National Archives and Record Administration. U.S. Department of Labor, Immigration and Naturalization Service. Oscar Richard Lange’s Declaration of Intention, November 18, 1939 and Petition for Naturalization, September 17, 1942.

Image Source: National Archives and Record Administration. U.S. Department of Labor, Immigration and Naturalization Service. Oscar Richard Lange’s Declaration of Intention, November 18, 1939.

 

Categories
Economists Germany Harvard Minnesota Northwestern

Halle. Economics PhD Alumnus, John Henry Gray (Harvard AB, 1887), 1892

 

The Harvard graduate, John Henry Gray (A.B. 1887), was an instructor of political economy at his alma mater in 1888-1889. His European tour as a graduate student took him from Halle (Germany) to Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. He returned to the U.S. with a doctorate from the University of Halle to begin his academic career at Northwestern. A chronology of his life and subsequent career is included below.

Fun Fact: John Henry Gray donated his private library of about one thousand volumes to Carleton College. It included a third edition of Wealth of Nations.

__________________

John Henry Gray

1859. Born March 11, 1859 at Charleston, Ill.

Prepared for college at State Normal University in Illinois.

1881-1882. Principal of the High School of Centralia, Illinois.

1883. Enters Harvard College. Sophomore year he began his studies of Political Economy.

1887. A.B., magna cum laude.  Harvard with special honors in Political Science. Phi-Beta-Kappa.

1887-1888. Graduate student, Harvard University.

1888-1889. Appointed instructor of political economy following resignation of Professor J. L. Laughlin.

July, 1889. Rogers Fellow of Harvard for graduate study of two semesters at Halle with Professors Conrad and Loening (1889-1890); seven months at Paris (1890-1891), with Levasseur, Leroy-Beaulieu, Sorel, De Foville; one semester at Vienna with Carl Menger, Böhm-Bawerk and v. Miaskowski (1891); and more than a semester in Berlin with Wagner, Schmoller and Gneist (1891-92).

1892. Doctorate awarded by the University of Halle, magna cum laude. Thesis: Die Stellung der privaten Beleuchtungsgesellschaften zu Stadt und Staat. Die Erfahrungen in Wien, Paris und Massachusetts. Jena, 1893.

1892-1907. Professor of political economy and social science, Northwestern University.

1893. Chairman of the World’s Congress Auxiliary on Political Science in Chicago.

1894-1896. Chairman of the municipal committee of the Civic Federation of Chicago.

1902. Consultant to the United States Department of Labor to investigate restrictions of output in Great Britain.

1902. International Cooperative Congress in Manchester, England as representative of the U.S. Commissioner of Labor.

1902. U.S. representative to Congresses of labor, commerce and industry in Düsseldorf (Germany) and Ostend (Belgium).

1905. Member of the National Civic Federation Commission on Municipal Ownership.

1907-1920. Professor of economics, University of Minnesota.

1911-1914. National Civic Federation Commission on Municipal ownership, regulation of public service corporations.

1913. Author of compilation and analysis of all American statutes relating to the regulation of public service corporations.

1914. President of the American Economic Association.

1917-1919. Chief analyst and examiner in the bureau of valuations, Interstate Commerce Commission.

World War I. Lt. Col., U.S. Army and member of the board of appraisers of all property commandeered for the Army.  Second man to enroll in the American Legion.

1920-1925. Professor of economics, Carleton College.

1925-1928. Chief analyst and examiner in the bureau of valuations of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

1928-1932. Head of department of economics in the graduate school of American University.

1929. Joint author with G. W. Terborgh of a study of Urban Mortgages in the United States since 1920.

1933. Co-author with Jack Levin, The Regulation and Valuation of Public Utilities. Harper & Brothers.

1946. Died April 4 in Winter Park, Florida.

Sources:

Personal Notes, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Vol. 3 (Sept., 1892), pp. 112-113.

Jesse S. Robinson. John Henry Gray, 1859-1946. American Economic Review, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Sept. 1946), pp. 664-666.

 

Image Source: University of Minnesota Libraries, UMedia. Gray, John H. webpage.