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Feldy steps down

Boring, old and conservative professor Martin Feldstein is stepping down from teaching Ec 10, the intro to economics class here that is the biggest class at Harvard and taken by almost everyone who concentrates in a social science. Replacing him will be a young, conservative professor (it’s unclear on whether or not he too will be painfully boring) Greg Mankiw, who just finished his tenure as the top economist at the White House (head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors).

I think they should go back to having this class legitimately co-taught, as it was when John Kenneth Galbraith (a liberal former Kennedy advisor and author of the famous book The Affluent Society) taught it with Feldy (and another conservative before that). I understand that explain capitalism in a purely scientific way means being a cold-hearted conservative in some ways, but it doesn’t have to be two former Republican advisors. I also think that the alternate Ec 10 is not a sufficient answer and crams to much info into one semester.

Thoughts?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2005 at 1:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

  1. John Jernigan | March 11th, 2005 | 12:38 am

    My problem with ec 10–and this is from someone who is fairly economically conservative–was with the selection of articles we had to read. Liberals and conservatives can both agree (I think) that taxes, in the most basic supply-demand analysis, create deadweight loss, even if they disagree about the extent and importance of that consequence. But on topics like minimum wage, social security, international trade, etc., the sourcebook never seemed to fully explore the arguments on both sides. This is pretty impressionistic, though; it’d be interesting if someone took this year’s sourcebook and tried to loosely classify each article.

  2. O_Pombo | March 11th, 2005 | 12:55 am

    Is the political colour of a lecturer so important in order for one to have a non-biased education?
    I think it doesn`t matter much, as long as it`s provided information about other opposing theories or points of view. That is ultimately the aim of the university: to provide the tools for one to investigate and reach his own conclusions, whether agreeing or disagreeing with those of the teacher.

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