No more Heterodoxy or Pluralism at Notre Dame
by Benjamin on September 30, 2009
The Heterodox economists, pluralists and historians of Economics at Notre Dame who were placed in their ‘own department’ in 2003; are being given the sack. One is reminded of certain ghetto creation schemes and the inhabitants later extermination. And this at a time when the favoured ‘mainstream’ is finding itself under repeated attacks for not being pluralist or inclusive enough. Another nail in the coffin of economists who are not much bothered with issues taking place in the real world. For Shame.
In 2003, the University decided to place the heterodox economists and other economists they did not think much of in the above Department. The then existing economics department was renamed as the Department of Economics and Econometrics and the only economists really allowed in it were mainstream economists of a very narrow sort. One of the reasons given for splitting the Economics Department in 2003 was the low ranking of the doctoral program. Recent research shows that at the time of the ‘splitting’ of the Department, the ‘heterodox-pluralist’ department had much better research productivity than the mainstream department. Thus, the powers at Notre Dame have opted for scholarly mediocrity over excellence. (This from Fred Lee, 17 Sep. 2009, More on this from Teresa Ghilarducci, open economics blog, The Observer and The Chronicle.)
The main ‘argument’ for getting rid of the economists were their lower journal ranking publications… I won’t go into the ranking debate here but it goes to show how important such things can be – even if they are artificial. In fact, only the other day I was chatting with another young lecturer who was telling me how he was planning to publish in a few ‘two star’ journals and then try to move up. ‘What are you trying to argue?’ I asked him rather naively. He looked a bit blankly at me and continued talking about just spending the next six months doing some new derivations of an older model… And so the progress of science marches on. Right.
The latest edition of the Scholastic Magazine at Notre Dame just had an article called “The Homeless Heterodox.” It is only in hardcopy, but some of the highlights of the article can be found here
http://openeconomicsnd.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/the-homeless-heterodox/