URPE to Present Ec. Dept. Reforms To Grad Students

A group of radical economists next Tuesday will submit to a meeting of graduate students in Economics a series of demands calling for far-reaching reforms in the Economics Department.

The demands are contained in a position paper published by Harvard members of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), a nationwide organization of socialist economists.

The Graduate Economics Club, a Faculty-recognized group to which all graduate students in the department belong, will consider the demands.

At the meeting, the club will seek to formulate a common graduate student position to present to the Visiting Committee on Economics, which will hold its biennial meeting at Harvard on December 11.

URPE's position paper includes a demand for the hiring of at least one Faculty member competent to teach Marxist economic theory.

The department has failed to renew the contracts of two Marxist economists for next year and another is leaving for a tenured position elsewhere, leaving no non-tenured Marxist economists at Harvard. There are presently no tenured non-capitalist economists in the department.

Other Demands

Other demands made by URPE call for:

equal voting powers for students on the department's non-tenured faculty selection and instruction committees;

drastic revision of teaching techniques with increased emphasis on discussion rather than lectures; and,

changes in course requirements in the Ph.D. program with choices allowed between theory courses in conventional and Marxist economics, and between econometric and historical methods of approach to the subject.

The position paper accuses the department of being a "trade school" preparing students to be "marketable economists". "As future commodities, students must be prepared to be what their buyers want them to be--tool users who are themselves tools," the paper says. The paper also says the visiting committee is dominated by "leading capitalists".

URPE hopes to dramatize the paper's contentions in front of the committee, should the Graduate Economics Club back the demands.