Students Give Teachers a Failing Grade

"Departments of economics are graduating a generation of idiot savants, brilliant at esoteric mathematics yet innocent of actual economic life."

--Wassily Leontiev, Nobel Prize economist.

The walls of the economics department at the University of Victoria are under seige. In more ways than one. Stark white pages, each with a quote challenging the legitimacy of neoclassical economic's underlying assumptions, lined the walls to greet economics students and professors alike one Monday morning. Some students were not amused. "It feels like someone's saying 'You're stupid, you're stupid' with every sign," one complained.

But the Alternative Economics Committee, a group of students with loftier goals than scholastic regurgitation, were prepared to bruise a few egos. Deciding to wrest the laurels from their professors for one day, they confronted what they termed "fatal abstractions in economics" -- the flaws of the neoclassical paradigm taught as gospel in every school in North America.

Student radicals in the '60s created a forum to address the question that was being glossed over or entirely ignored during their classes, the question that burned in the minds of youth -- what was the US doing in Vietnam? The teach-ins that followed involved the brightest minds and the bravest professors and served to legitimize dissident thought and inspire action.

The Real-World Economics Teach-In was the model for the next step in activism. Rather than focusing on a single political issue, the students at UVic took on the whole paradigm -- examining the real-life consequences of neoclassical economics. For Tom Green, chief organizer of the event, inspiration came from his experiences in the field, using his university education in environmental sciences to fight ecologically suicidal projects. "It was like being a firefighter in a town where the arsonists are paid," he stated dryly in his introductory speech.

Green recounted a dilemma he faced when taking a trip: "A Dutch study had made me aware that the environmental impact of flight justified only one flight per lifetime. So I looked into traveling by train, but discovered that it was about three times the price."

Constantly he was in situations where people were ignoring the environmental costs in favor of heeding the market costs, and the gap between the two was not shrinking despite the public's growing awareness of environmental issues. Economics became a fascination to him, and when he went back to school he decided to study ecological economics.

But what he found was a department mired in its own muck, more interested in proving its validity as an airtight science than looking critically at how it affected the world. And he wasn't the only one. Not by far. At this university there were rumblings of discontent coming from a dozen different directions. Political science students wondering about the ethics of first world trading with the third; sociology students who saw how mathematicians played with the stats to fit the ideal model; students of all stripes who wondered how the bafflegab related to the lives of everyday people.

At first, organizers thought that they would have a hard time finding faculty willing to publicly challenge the department. "Instead we had profs volunteering," Green said. "All of them wanted to speak out. We couldn't fit them all in." The Teach-In was a series of hour-long panels that ran all day, followed by a question period. Almost every speaker had more to say than their 15 minutes allotted -- a sign of the need for the forum -- and almost every one had a valid ax to grind. And the question periods were hardly less dramatic.

After the introduction, Dr. Peter Kennedy, economics professor and sole defender of the department, had a number of contentions with the opening statements. To refute one such statement, he referred the audience to a certain page on a certain syllabus as if to chastise the speakers for their errant studies. But his condescension and his inability to explain in plain language his position, spoke volumes about the fundamental problems in the department.

The majority of the speakers, freed from the restraints of economic dogma, took the opportunity to release a variety of memes to the audience. "There's no social security in a world that consumes the biosphere in which we live." "Nuclear energy is touted as a 'cheap fuel.' But is the waste disposal of spent nuclear fuel factored into the cost?"

But far from being a free-for-all, the forum was quite well organized -- in fact, with podiums, panels and speakers it more closely resembled a conference than an protest by fed-up students. But when Dr. Kennedy took the stand a second time, it became evident why this set-up was chosen. He stood in front of the crowd, casually dressed in a shirt and jeans, and attempted to justify neoclassical economics. The anger and condescension was gone -- he was anxious and appealed to the audience. The formality of the setting had neatly inverted the traditional formula -- he was having to desperately defend the holy canon. The students had him on the run.

After being immersed in seven hours of dissenting thought, it looked like Kennedy's neat mathematical world was in disarray. He claimed that economists were like weather forecasters -- they explained, but did not influence events. He admitted the need for interdisciplinary studies to cross-pollinate and bring studies like economics into the real world. But what he left unsaid was that without it, it is a hollow numbers game.

What the attendants of the Real World Economics Teach-In took away with them was the realization that their problem with the economics department was a problem across campus. Every department suffers a profound lack by pretending to be an island unto itself -- political science without philosophy, engineering without art, and economics without ecology -- all are stunted by their isolation.