Harvard. Galbraith’s Proposal to Split the Economics Department, 1973

 

During the early 1970s the Harvard economics department went through an identity crisis in which the orthodox mainstream was challenged by a not-so-silent minority of proto-heterodox economists and a dissatisfied graduate student body. The following three artifacts from the discussion of that time come from John Kenneth Galbraith’s papers. I would not exclude the possibility that some/much of the December 26, 1972 memo from the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences was inspired, if not directly penned, by Galbraith.

Galbraith was incapable of writing even an intrauniversity memo without flashes of wit as both the draft and final versions of his memo clearly demonstrate. And yet, there remains an overwhelming pathetic, quixotic note to his proposal of dividing the economics department in order to save its diverse, social elements.

____________________________

When the Dean Asks
How to Fix the Harvard Economics Department

December 26, 1972

From: THE DEAN OF THE FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

To: THE CHAIRMAN OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Re: TERMS OF REFERENCE FOR A STUDY OF AND RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Recent developments and discussions suggest problems of some concern in the Department of Economics. In the belief that such problems, if attacked in timely fashion and a spirit of goodwill, will be more readily resolved than if allowed to persist and be aggravated, I am proposing action which I trust will meet with the approval of all concerned. I shall first identify those matters on which, I believe, there will be general agreement and then suggest terms of reference for the appropriate action.

1. The Department of Economics has become very large. In the current catalogue I count 25 tenured members, 56 non-tenured members, 5 visiting professors and 13 economists in associated departments principally the Kennedy School, in addition to the large force of teaching assistants. It is not surprising that so large a body should have problems in maintaining a sense of common purpose and identity.
2. There has of late been a deep difference of view on appointments in the Department. This has led to the suggestions that the Department, its size notwithstanding, is not emphasizing an adequate representation of diverse, socially unpopular or methodologically different positions, and that standards for promotion operate to exclude or minimize the representation of such views.
3. There will be agreement that a majority may be less urgently seized of the need for representation of a minority view than the minority.
4. In recent years there has been dissatisfaction among students, principally graduate students, with instruction in the Department. Again I state the fact without passing on the merits of the position. I do note that, historically, students have found satisfaction and pride in their association with the Department.
5. The question has been raised whether some appointments are being appraised in accordance with contribution or non-contribution to or effect on corporate profit-making which, however useful and legitimate, is external to the scientific work and teaching of the Department.

In light of the foregoing I propose to ask the three past presidents of the American Economic Association together with the two American Nobel Prize winners who are engaged in active teaching (one of whom is also current President of the American Economic Association), together with the Chairman of the Department of Economics to examine the Department as a matter of urgency and to report. The following are the terms of reference for this examination:

1. The group shall be denoted the Special Study Committee, and hereafter as the Committee.
2. In its deliberations the Committee will consult to the fullest extent with students of the Department as well as with tenured and non-tenured members of the Department, and will discuss its provisional findings with students and faculty.
3. The Committee will consider and report on whether the present personnel of the Department reflects an appropriately broad spectrum of method and view and, as necessary, on corrective steps. Corrective steps may specifically include recommendations for change in past action.
4. The committee will consider whether the present teaching of economics is sufficiently broad, and specifically whether there should be a second and alternative track to a doctorate in economics embracing both course work and examinations and in which the primary emphasis would be on history of economic thought, institutional economics and socialist thought, or subject matter disciplines not required by the present framework.
5. The Committee shall consider possible division or subdivision or other reorganization of the Department to provide greater knowledge of candidates for appointment or promotion, greater corporate responsibility for instruction and other possible gains from smaller size. In this connection special attention should be given to the relationship with the Kennedy School of Government.
6. The effect of external corporate or other activities of Departmental members as these may bear on appointments, teaching or research, shall be examined with recommendations.
7. The report of the Committee shall be made public and, in the absence of specific and fully-supported objection, it is my hope that its conclusions will be found acceptable to the Department. There is no intention to alter the constitutional arrangements by which tenured members, as now or in a suitably reorganized or subdivided Department, if that is the decision, are responsible for appointments and instruction.

____________________________

Galbraith Draft Statement (undated)
[handwritten additions in bold italics]

Draft #2

MEMORANDUM

MEMO:

The President
The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Members of the Department of Economics

From: John Kenneth Galbraith

 

In these last weeks tensions long present in the Department of Economics at Harvard have come to the surface. The consequences are attracting interest and discussion well beyond the confines of the Department and the University. It is doubtful if anyone, and certainly any active participants, can state the issues with complete impartiality but some of the basic circumstances admit of agreement. They are.

(1) The Department has become very large—the current catalogue lists twenty-five regularly tenured professors, thirty-five nontenured professors, thirteen members in an adjunct relationship from other parts of the University and five visiting professors. In addition there are a large number of teaching assistants. The Department has become a parliamentary and not a corporate body. Long before the recent explosion I expressed my concern not only to my colleagues but also to the top management over our increasingly ungainly and ineffective mass and its dangers. I encountered little or no disagreement.

(2) The Department has for some years been deeply divided in its views. There has been an ineffective and mostly unchanging minority, and an effective and largely unchanging majority.

(3) While the basis of the division is diverse, including the polemical folk-tendencies of academic life, our learned delight in self assertion, our sensitivity to the intellectual shortcomings of others, differences in reaction to change, political attitudes, it is also a difference in the view of economics. I doubt that any statement of this difference can avoid prejudice. I shall content myself with being dull. It partly involves the acceptance or rejection of the established economic institutions; partly acceptance or rejection of accustomed preconceptions of economic thought, partly the trade-off between precision in established modalities and lesser precision in more innovative, critical or experimental work; partly it has to do with the degree of commitment to measurement and mathematics.

(4) While the underlying fact is a difference in the view of the subject (including the importance of representing the minority views) the argument over appointments invokes competence. Each side with no slight sense of moral righteousness defines competence in its own image. What is unscientific or soft to one side is irrelevant or unreal or unuseful to the other. Certainty in these positions is enhanced by the effect of professional esteem on ego. The members of the majority rightly reflect on the high regard in which precision and excellence of their work is held in their particular spheres of econometric, mathematical or applied work. The members of the minority rejoice similarly on their standing in the profession generally. Given these attitudes, the likelihood that one side will yield gracefully to the other is (if possible) even further reduced. Thus the absolute certainty of continued conflict.

(5) The difference comes to a head over appointments. This reflects a clear view of the reality. It is recognized by all that it is people who determine what is taught and investigated—and wholly so in such an unstructured environment as Harvard. The majority, not unnaturally, has prevailed. In this context a minority should not be expected to acquiesce. To do so is to accept eventual extinction. No one who is serious about his views or methods should countenance that.

(6) The students, once pridefully associated with the Department, are discontented. Their affiliation is largely, although by no means completely, with the minority. As a consequence some members of the majority hold or harbor the thought that the minority is acting less out of conviction than a desire to seek popularity or appease student opinion. Members of the minority react with a strong (and in my own case previously undisclosed) concern for the quality of our institution.

(7) There is a question as to the bearing of subjective judgments formed in connection with the business activities of members—or in consequence of those activities—on promotion of those whose disposition or work leads to criticism of cherished and remunerative economic institutions.

Aggravated problems sometimes allow of simple choices. This is so in the present case. One course is to continue as now, and enjoy the acrimony and continue to invite, by our public bickering, disesteem for the subject, the Department, the University, our students and ourselves. The other is to move to the obvious and forthright resolution, on which will be to the benefit of all concerned.

The solution is to divide the present vast Department into two parts. One part, a Department or Division of General Economics*, would reflect the specialized interests and scientific purpose of the majority, including those whose identification with the minority has been based not on identity of professional interest but concern for academic diversity. A second part would be the Department of Social Economics. This initially much smaller Department would consist of those tenured and untenured members whose active identification with the social issues of planning, economic structure, criticism, or socialism or institutionalism leads them to make the transfer. The new Department, born out of a need to ensure diversity, would itself be under the normal academic obligation to perpetuate diversity. It would develop an undergraduate and graduate curriculum and degree requirements compromising nothing in depth and rigor, in accordance with the interests of its members and of students. Subject to established ad hoc procedures—and its resources—it would make its own promotions and appointments.

*No difficulty should be made over a name. The parent Department could be called the Department of Economics.

The initial resources of the new Department would consist of the present financial commitment to those making the change. There would, some minor administrative costs apart, be no added burden on the University budget. I would make the transfer and make the revenues from the Paul M. Warburg Professorship, including the supporting research revenues (on neither of which I have drawn in net amount in recent years) available for a new professorial appointment. I believe, not without knowledge, that money for one or two added professorships as well as for research could be raised from sources not presently open either to the University or the Department. Scholarship funds would be divided in accordance with student demand. I am willing to commit a good share of personal time in the next year to money raising, a task in which, unlike my economics, my competence has been sufficiently established.

May I note in summary the advantages of the foregoing proposal.

(1) The basic cause of distress and conflict in the present Department of Economics would be removed. Each of the new Departments or Divisions will be in a position to develop the subject in full accordance with its own lights. Neither will be in the academically repellant position (however agreeable in practice) of imposing its standards or preferences on the other.

(2) The problem of excessive scale and consequent diminution in sense of communal responsibility for teaching, research and appointments is solved in the case of the new small Department or Division. It is alleviated for the larger parent Department.

(3) The Department of Social Economics if it is to attract, retain and place its graduate students, will have to demonstrate itself in competition with its older and more prestigious parent. This competition will be exceedinglyhealthy for both. This is an appealing point. While businessmen favor competition more often in principle than in practice, this is not an error into which any good economist will allow himself to fall.

(4) Undergraduate instruction in the new Department will benefit no alone from the members’ commitment to their subject matter but also from the greater sense of community as between teaching assistants, tenured and non-tenured faculty in a much smaller department and the present Department will be better. In the present Department not even all tenured and untenured members are known to each other. Teaching assistants are known only to a fraction of the faculty members and even less is known about their performance. And again in undergraduate teaching the vigorous competition of the new Department will be good for the older one.

(5) Problems associated with the corporate business activities of professors will be at least partly resolved. No question of concern for attitudes of business clients, however subjective, will be thought to influence those who are passing on appointments in the new Department. Subject no doubt, to appropriate safeguards the activities of present members of the Department with their potential for useful employment, income and information could perhapsremain.

(6) The two Departments through a coordinating committee might [illegible word] combine for the time being on the elementary course.

(7) The creation of the new Department with an admixture of old and new members intent on developing both old and new lines of inquiry will affirm, as nothing else, Harvard’s avidly proclaimed commitment to free inquiry by people of the highest calibre and to whatever result.

(8) Nothing is forever. If, after say ten years, there is demand for reunification, why not.

With so much to be gained—and also so much trouble to be avoided—I hope that we can proceed to consider this solution with a minimum of delay. Needless to say—perhaps on the basis of past departmental performance it is very necessary that I say—I am ready at any notice to lend a hand.

____________________________

Memo On Splitting the Harvard Economics Department
[Apparent Final Draft]

June 18, 1973

From:  JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

To:

PRESIDENT DEREK C. BOK
DEAN-DESIGNATE HENRY ROSOVSKY
PROFESSOR JAMES S. DUESENBERRY
MEMBERS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Re: THE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

The Department of Economics is, I would judge, entering into a period of considerable calm and tranquility. The older dissidents and heretics in the Department will, with one or two exceptions, soon be retiring. And, in any case, they are now a harmless minority. Within a year or so the younger generation of dissidents will be safely gone. Thus the expectation of a period of scholarly calm.

My purpose in this memorandum is to suggest that the prospect is not as happy as these developments imply. And it is to suggest some steps which, without unduly disturbing the equanimity of the situation, the Department and the Administration would be wise to consider. May I note that these are matters on which I have no personal, as distinct from general, professional concern. I am one of those who will be contributing, however modestly, to a more seemly, tranquil and comfortable life by a comparatively early departure.

The problems remaining after the prospective changes are two. There is first the fact that, while faculty affairs have been generally arranged to the satisfaction of all, the students remain deeply dissatisfied. Let no one doubt this or seek, by the usual academic rationalizations, to explain it away. I was much exposed to this in the special seminar last autumn; I determined then to inform myself in a minor way during the spring, which I have done. The students, over a wide political spectrum, deeply dislike their work and the Department. This is especially true of the first-year students who, in a puzzling exercise in public relations reflecting an odd attitude toward education, are now blithely told at the outset to expect the worst year of their lives. Those who have been here two or three years also look back with discontent on their educational experience. My first year of graduate work was one of the most vital and interesting of my life. So, I believe it was with most of my generation.

The complaint of the students is straitforward. They are squeezed, especially in their first year but increasingly as a test in later work, into a narrow model-building, problem-solving, quasi-mathematical routine that they find boring and unrelated to the world in which they live. The emasculated careerist may accept the routine and do well. The student who thought that economics was a window on the problems of the world is abjectly disappointed.

These student reactions are heavily discounted by most although not all of the senior faculty. The rationalization is that such student attitudes are inevitable—that the modern student is inherently lazy, feckless, radical and dissatisfied. It is even suggested, not without scholarly vigor, that those who express concern about students are courting a student popularity in a sadly unscholarly tradition. As I say, this rationalization seems to me unwise and something that very soon will have a more practical consequence. A bad reputation in these matters is not easily kept a secret. It could happen that eventually the Department will have very few graduate students of indigenous origin of any consequence, a few committed careerists, mathematicians and model-builders apart. Numbers and quality of applicants will decline. In consequence, the ratio of faculty to active, teachable graduate students, which is now approaching one to one, will pass that point and will widen as a ratio of students to teachers. This is not hyperbole. A course was recently described to me by a graduate student in which he was the only participant along with three faculty members. We have a fair number of seminars with only a handful of students, sometimes but one. Faculty life will continue in comfort. Workshops will serve, as already now, to disguise the shortage of students. But still there will be nervousness.

There is another and more subjective danger. The harmony which one now foresees is based on a general commitment to neoclassical economics or its applied refinements. Accomplishment in model-building and refinement is, I think nearly all will agree, an increasingly stern requirement. We would not again hire a labor economist who, like Professor Dunlop or Professor Slichter, made his career out of a practical association with the unions and the problems of labor mediation. Professor Leontief, were he now showing the experimental tendencies that marked his early career, would be in trouble. Even his work, when firmly established, was not strongly supported. We would not have an economist who was too much preoccupied with the practical details of tax reform—unless he protected his flank by suitable theoretical or econometric exercise. My own past tendencies would certainly not be acceptable for promotion—although on the merits of this, with characteristic tact, I disqualify myself. What is not in doubt is that we are now very strong in the journals but much less strong in the obscenely practical matters on which many people, including many students, expect economists to be useful. This could be damaging to the reputation of the Department. The latter has always depended in appreciable measure not on the great scientists but on its vulgar practitioners.

Now let me say a word on reform. Mention of reform leads to thoughts of reform of the Department—so it is with faculty and also students. The present course of instruction is wrong. Let us find the right one. The problem is that no one line of graduate economic instruction can now serve all interests, reflect all points of view. Nor does it deal with the highly important fact that instruction is far less important than the inclination of the people who guide it. The Department is now a vast parliamentary body. So long as there is only one educational track, as a matter of course it will reflect the preferences of the majority. All of us, in the oldest of academic traditions, appraise excellence using ourselves as the yardstick. Reform requires that we begin to provide real choices as to teachers and as to work. Three possibilities occur to me:

1. We should have in the Department of Economics two tracks to two Ph.D.’s. One of these would be in economics, another in (say) social economics. Professors in the Department would be grouped into two broad Executive Committees around these tracks. And each of these two Executive Committees would have responsibility not only for developing graduate work in its track and for examination therein but also for recruitment and promotion. This would broaden the choice for students; would mean that we would have two more nearly corporate bodies rather than one parliamentary body to guide instruction and appointments; would foster the kind of competition which all economists intrinsically and devoutly applaud; and would reduce by half the present parliamentary tendency to exclude the minority view. The first track would continue the present program with all of its neoclassical and model-building rigor. The second track would be experimental, humane and with a much stronger orientation to the emerging issues of our time. It would not, and this must be emphasized, involve any less effort.
2. The second possibility would be to establish within the Department an institute—an Institute for Economic Innovation. This would enlist the members of the senior faculty so inclined, would develop a program purely of graduate instruction and would lead also to a degree which would reflect its own course of instruction. The purpose of constituting this as an institute would be twofold: to get the energy and attention of one man who would see the institute as the projection of his own efforts, and to use the institute as a device for raising new funds for both chairs and research. It is my near certainty, based on some experience as a medicant, that this enterprise, properly presented, would be very attractive to donors. I am not sure, however, that given the present size of the Department, it would not be wiser simply to allot some Graustein appointments to the Institute for the next few years.
3. The third and final possibility would be to have two Departments of Economics—one Department of Economics and one Department of Social Economics. There are advantages to this—again the healthy competition in which all economists theoretically rejoice, elimination of the present diseconomies of scale, the much more clearly defined differentiation of purpose. It would not be as difficult a solution as seems at first glance. Those who approve of the Department as it is would remain with the Department of Economics. The rest would make the new Department. It would form its character from those who join it in the feeling that a more strongly innovative, humane and applied—in the modern sense—approach to economics is in order. The problem is, of course, that it involves the largest disruption in established institutional arrangements. That is not something to be undertaken lightly. Sometimes, though, that is good.

I am persuaded that in one or another of the above arrangements lies the only hope for a satisfactory future. For a while the tranquility that is in prospect will be greatly enjoyed. Given the sterile tendencies of the accepted economics and the attitudes of the students, it will be, if not the tranquility of the tomb, certainly that of a kind of somnambulant decay.

J.K.G.

Source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. John Kenneth Galbraith Personal Papers. Series 5. Harvard University File, 1949-1990. Box 526. Folder “Memorandum on Reorganization of the Department of Economics”.

Image Source: Harvard Class Album 1958.