Economics at Harvard

Harvard University's economics department has some 60 able faculty members, including two Nobel prizewinners and the ubiquitous John Kenneth Galbraith and John Dunlop, who is due to be named Secretary of Labor. This array of talent alone should make the department second to none. Apparently that is not the case. One of the Nobel laureate economics professors, Russian-born Wassily Leontief, 68, has announced that, after 44 years on the faculty, he will resign from Harvard this summer to teach at New York University. His reasons for departing: the department's curriculum is "too narrow" and theoretical, and the senior faculty has lost touch with the students.

Leontief's detractors within the department were quick to point out that he may be leaving simply because he is approaching the mandatory retirement age of 70 and because N.Y.U. offered him more money. But other economics professors, including Fellow Nobel Winner Kenneth Arrow (who almost left for Stanford last year) and Galbraith (who plans to retire this summer), agree with Leontief that the department must broaden its view of contemporary problems. Indeed, Galbraith has noted "the obsolescence of neoclassical economic theory," the foundation of the department's curriculum. Some faculty members and graduate students also insist that the department ignores such real problems as economic development in the Third World and in agriculture while emphasizing mathematical approaches to economic theories.

Leontief, who developed the input-output formula that helps economists determine how changes in one sector of the economy affect other sectors, has other complaints about the department. He is bitter that it did not broaden its scope by granting tenure to four radical economists in the past few years (three subsequently left) or by hiring the woman who assisted him in developing applications for his formula, Brandeis Professor Anne Carter.

Hostile and Distrusting. Not all of the criticism comes from within the economics department. Last April a visiting committee of Harvard overseers (trustees) headed by Andrew Brimmer, then a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, reported that the graduate economics curriculum was "greatly in need of reformation" and that its first-year required graduate course was "disgraceful." The overseers found the senior faculty "inaccessible and unapproachable, seeing only the few students who gain access to their empires," while a "hostile and distrusting" relationship festered between students and faculty.

Economics Department Chairman James Duesenberry, formerly a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, withheld the overseers' report from the senior faculty for eight months. When the report's conclusions were published in the Crimson, the student paper, Duesenberry refused to comment except to say: "That is the way I run my show." At Harvard, where the administration is reluctant to intervene in departmental affairs, Duesenberry will probably have the last word.

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