Harvard's Tarnished Star

For the last five years graduate students and a few Faculty members have been criticizing the Economics Department for the rigidity of its curriculum and for the lack of diversity and Faculty contact in its graduate program. The discontent was generally dismissed as the typical yowling of a minority of radical activists, and the status quo marched on.

The popular peace was shattered this week, however, when a confidential report of a University visiting committee, criticizing almost every aspect of the graduate economics program and officially substantiating most of the old "radical" claims, was released to The Crimson.

That an official Board of Overseers Visiting Committee found Harvard's Economics Department in a state that its "future effectiveness is threatened" speaks for itself.

But the report did not speak for itself, at least not publicly. Only the Board of Overseers, President Bok, Dean Rosovsky, and James S. Duesenberry, chairman of the Economics Department, even saw a copy of the document, although it was completed last April.

When Liam Ebrill, a second-year graduate student in Economics and a member of the Committee of the Graduate Economics Club, asked Duesenberry's secretary for a copy of the visiting committee report last Wednesday, he was told: "It is not for you."

Its intent for those who did see it was clear: Change is what the report demands. The report calls for major "reformation of the curriculum," to include subjects "not easily encompassed in the corpus of traditional economics as taught at Harvard."

The key phrase is "as taught at Harvard." Not only does the report criticize the content of graduate courses, it scores the quality of instruction. One message is that Harvard Economics professors do not teach enough graduate courses, and that students consider them "uncaring, unapproachable, and inaccessible."

The report also finds the Economic Department's progress in affirmative action "falling far short of other institutions," and recommends a "much greater and far more systematic effort" in hiring women and minorities.

Whether reform will come as a result of the visiting committee report remains in doubt. The Graduate Economics Club voted yesterday to begin a complete evaluation of the Economics Department Faculty and to organize a meeting between graduate students and Economics Faculty members. It also passed a proposal demanding that two graduate students sit on the formal committee making hiring and tenure decisions in the department.

But whether the Faculty can reform itself is unclear. And that, in a way, is the key to the whole issue.