Forthcoming, Eastern Economic Journal
Notre Dame Loses
Deirdre McCloskey
Visiting Professor, Denison University
UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History,
and English,
University of Illinois at Chicago
Tinbergen Visiting Professor of Economics, Philosophy, and Art and
Cultural Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam
Not in football.
This morning I was planning my courses for next academic year,
thinking what books I would assign, what
balance of topics the students and I would pursue, when it struck me, “I
love doing this. In fact, I love almost
everything about my job as a professor.” But the paradox is, if I love
the job so very much why are there days on
which I can taste my pension, years down the pike?
I’ll tell you why. University presidents, provosts,
vice-presidents, deans, and chairs, that oxymoron
parallel to “military intelligence,” “academic administration.” That’s
why. It must be a difficult job, because it’s
seldom done well, this administering.
I’ve done a little of it, and was no good at it, which shows the
problem: professors are not trained as
administrators. They often don’t approach it in a businesslike way.
Former professors of German or chemical
engineering or church history do not understand that business actually
depends on Love and Justice as much as
on Prudence and Courage. (The point was made by Peter Drucker in a
famous article in the Harvard Business
Review in 1989 that businesses are coming to resemble voluntary
organizations like churches: in a free society
people will exit if they aren’t loved.) The academic bosses take their
view of American business from
anti-bourgeois artists and intellectuals since 1848: Marx, Shaw, Diego
Rivera, Sinclair Lewis, Kurt Weil, Oliver
Stone. And so in playing at being businesslike they reckon they have to
be brutal and impulsive and thoughtless.
And so they don’t succeed.
Let’s see: some common-sense and Druckerian rules for success might
be: Mainly encourage. Threaten
sparingly. Support all your people. Use actual reading and reflecting,
your own, to decide who has the most
exciting ideas. Don’t depend on mindless rankings devised by
quantophiles who don’t know econometrics and
don’t believe in judgment, such as the economist David Laband (see
McCloskey 2001, pp. 140-148). Depend on
your faculty to read seriously their colleague’s works for hiring and
promotion and an intellectual life,
discussing the work together and reporting to you on their
deliberations. Make them do it. . . well, encourage
them to, and if they come to you with tables of rankings as substitutes
for engaging intellectually with their
colleagues’ work, cut their budgets, to get the dough to encourage
departments that take intellectual life
seriously. This above all: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
What the administration is doing right now to the Department of
Economics at the University of Notre
Dame has become a case study in violating such common sense.
Academically speaking Notre Dame was once not much of a place.
When the sainted Father Hesburgh
first got there in 1952 he called a press conference to announce the
raising of academic standards, and was
chagrined when only sports writers showed up. But it’s gotten a lot
better. Notre Dame’s philosophy
department, for example, is very interesting, studying “Continental”
philosophy seriously, which is to say that
it’s not devoted exclusively (as are most American departments) to the
deadening orthodoxy of what is known as
“analytic” philosophy (cf. Samuelsonian economics). And when a
brilliant colleague of mine at Iowa named
Gerald Bruns went to Notre Dame’s English department, I took note.
Around 1980 Notre Dame showed the
good taste to ask me if I wanted to be chair of economics there, and I
was tempted. Though not at the time a
Christian, much less a Catholic, I thought the idea of a heterodox place
that took religious and similar thought
seriously in its relation to economics would be a good idea. Even then
I knew we had an excess supply of
low-grade imitations of MIT, and that economics was going down a bad
road in trying by Stalinist thuggery in
refereeing and hiring and other honor-granting to make every department
identical to every other.
The Department of Economics at Notre Dame has 23 faculty. It’s
known as a “heterodox”
department—post-Keynesian, Marxist, institutionalist, rhetorical, though
it has its Samuelsonians as well.
Everyone gets along fine. I know the work of two of the faculty pretty
well, David Ruccio and Philip Mirowski,
and of one slightly, Esther-Miriam Sent. By “know” I mean “have read
with some seriousness,” not “have heard
about as objects of gossip” or “have seen as names in The Leading
Journals” or “have taken the measure of
through Laband’s statistically amateurish work on reputation.” If you
haven’t read anything by Ruccio,
Mirowski, and Sent, well, you need to broaden your reading in
economics. You’re spending too much time with
The American Economic Review.
Ruccio is a leading Marxist economist. (If your reaction to that
is to exclaim, “Marxist economist!” then
you really need to get out more. Does it strike you as a reasonable
hypothesis that every one of the thousands
and thousands of very intelligent people who take the Marxist tradition
seriously are just dopes from whom you
can learn nothing at all?) Ruccio is an expert in Latin American
economies and a leader in bringing the
humanities and economics into conversation (if you’ve been reading my
columns you know why I think such a
conversation is a good idea). The words “value” and “deconstruction”
and even “postmodernism” have figured
heavily in Ruccio’s work over the past decade. Such terms are I know
pretty scary. But may I suggest
gently—I’ve experienced the difficulty economists have in hearing the
suggestion—that The New York Times is
perhaps not the last word on literary theory, and that
failed-English-Ph.D. journalists might not really grasp the
words they hate so passionately? Ruccio does grasp the words of the
humanities. A quinti-lingual economist is
rare enough (sextilingual if you count math/stat as a language). But
one who uses the languages to read seriously
in comparative literature and the humanities, and then applies his
learning to economics, is practically unheard
of: see for instance the new book Ruccio and Jack Amariglio have
written, Postmodern Moments in Modern
Economics, this fall from the Princeton University Press. Even the
great Albert Hirschman, long at the Institute
for Advanced Study at Princeton, and my favorite example these days of a
missed yet blindingly obvious
candidate for a Nobel Prize (until last November it was Vernon Smith;
before that it was George Akerloff:
non-mainstream, both), has been timid by the Ruccio standard in bringing
the humanities to bear on economic
issues:.
Philip Mirowski is also something special in economics. He
started as an economic historian, a highly
original one, but then became a student of economics itself, especially
its history, and even more original. His
original idea is the shocking one of actually looking at how economists
argue. Craaazy. Again, you can see why
I like what he does: just as I think it’s a mistake that economics has
not faced up to the issues Marxists and
English professors draw attention to, I think it’s a mistake that
economics has not faced up to its actual
persuasive character and history. Mirowski exposed one of the con games
in modern economics in More Heat
Than Light: Economics as Social Physics (1989) and Against Mechanism:
Why Economics Needs Protection
from Science (1988), and then took off in an entirely new direction in
Machine Dreams: Economics becomes a
Cyborg Science (2001). Mirowski is one of the most original minds
examining the character of economics that
has ever graced the discipline (Sent works with him on the same project,
and so far as I can judge is pretty good
in her own right).
A correct use of statistical significance is the following: if out
of the 23 people in the Department a
majority of 12 (say) were by a high standard Not Competent, Bad
Economists, Weird, Non-Mainstream and
Therefore to be Punished, what would be the odds that out of the three
balls I have drawn from the urn all three
turn out to be outstanding economic scientists? Answer: about ten to
one against.
What’s the problem nowadays at Notre Dame? One way of putting
it is that the administrators don’t
believe these are the odds. The Dean of the College of Arts and
Letters, one Mark Roche, together with his
agent in Economics, Richard Jensen, and with the backing of the Provost,
Nathan Hatch, and the apparent
entrepreneurship of the Dean of the Graduate School, Jeffrey Kantor, has
decided that Notre Dame’s Econ Dept
is broke . . . and should become mainstream. For example, the
department is to abandon courses on Political
Economy and the History of Economic Thought (which set economics in its
wider social context) as
requirements in the graduate program. It is to make its graduate
program look like nearly every other program in
the United States, e.g. make the theory courses duller and more
“mathematical” and more useless for actual
scientific work; hire more econometricians, to teach the kids even more
completely how to misuse statistical
significance (when is the profession going to catch on to the con in
more and more and more econometrics?).
Or else.
The Department has resisted. It’s being punished with
appointments imposed on it; its promotions have
been turned back. It may be abolished entirely, its distinctive
graduate program scrapped, and a new one started
that will be drearily Samuelsonian. I infer from the rhetoric when this
threat is raised that the Graduate Dean,
Kantor, who is a chemical engineer, is behind it. He’s been fooled, it
seems, as so many physical scientists
have, by the absurd claim that modern Samuelsonian economics is
mathematical and quantitative “like physics”
(as the Samuelsonians put it; for which see Mirowski’s work). That the
math is existence theorems from the
mathematics department, not magnitude-math from physics and engineering,
and that the allegedly “quantitative”
work is vitiated by its entire dependence on meaningless tests of
statistical significance hasn’t seeped into the
consciousness of outsiders. (Don’t tell them: we may get away with this
phony way of claiming scientific status
for another decade or so. Heck, we may never have to explore the actual
magnitudes of economic phenomena!
We could go on being Samuelsonian solvers of chess problems forever, and
get high rankings in the journal
counts without having to learn anything about any extant economy!) Dean
Roche and Company argue that the
faculty don’t publish in enough Top Journals. That they do publish
important books doesn’t seem to cut any ice:
publish in the so-called refereed journals or die. That the Department
is famous for its unusual character is not
to be tolerated: either you do Dull-Normal Though Bankrupt “Science” or
you better watch out.
This is shooting yourself in the foot. True, a lot of
university administrators do it. They are besotted with
the alleged accuracy and objectivity of rankings of journals and
(therefore) of departments. The
ranked-and-refereed-article standard is you will note strange for senior
people: how many times do you have to
crowd out junior people in your sub-field hoping for a big hit to show
that you can do that trick? (Listen up, Jeff
Williamson.) But it’s unhelpful for evaluating junior people, too. The
standard should be Notre Dame’s, not that
of the editorial board of the American Economic Review (I have served on
it, and know). Read the stuff. Isn’t
that obviously the only way of raising standards—having some? Who cares
that an economist has demonstrated
that he knows how to misuse statistical significance and
existence-theorem proofs so he can get through the
idiot’s screen of major-journal refereeing? (“Show me your existence
theorem for this economic idea,” the
Idiot Boy demands. “What’s the statistical significance of that
coefficient?”) Where the paper is published is
under such circumstances irrelevant to the question whether Professor X
is doing good scientific work. Just
irrelevant. For Lord’s sake, read it.
Let’s think this through. Dean Roche, leading the charge
against his abnormal Department of Economics,
is a professor of German literature and of film. He is also an adjunct
in the Department of Philosophy. Now,
let’s see. What would have happened to Dean Roche’s academic career if
the normal in American academic life
had been enforced by his present methods? What if Dean Roche had had a
Dean Roche? I think that’s a fair test.
If mindless belief in conventional wisdom and mindless use of rankings
would have ruined American academic
life in the past, maybe, just maybe, it will ruin it in the future, too.
In 1960 (say) it was unheard of that an academic student of
literature (except outsiders like crazy French
intellectuals smoking up cafés, and a German Marxist or two) would
discuss movies. Really, so vulgar. But
discussing movies is among the things Dean Roche actually does. Under
the Dean-Roche Plan we should
increase his teaching load, to give him the right incentives (note:
teaching as punishment) to publish only
mainstream, conventional criticism of Thomas Mann’s novels (he sometimes
does write such criticism, come to
mention it, in the same way that Ruccio sometimes writes mainstream work
on Latin American economies and
Mirowski on economic history). The sort of philosophy that Dean Roche
studies is embargoed in most
American departments of philosophy. It’s that same “Continental”
philosophy in which Notre Dame is so
prominent, Hegel and such stuff. Continental philosophy in American
departments has a standing similar to that
of Political Economy (interpreted in a Marxist mode) in American
departments of economics. Most American
(or indeed most English-speaking—and, oddly, Finnish-speaking)
philosophers don’t regard anything but the
demonstrated sterilities of analytic philosophy 1955-style as Real
Philosophy. (Does that ring a bell, oh
economist?) When I asked a famous analytic philosopher of my
acquaintance named Searle whether he had read
any Hegel he replied, to the amusement of the grad students in
philosophy listening to our exchange, “No. I’ve
never read a page of Hegel, and I propose never to do so.” (Hey, John,
does it strike you as a reasonable
hypothesis that every one of the thousands and thousands of very
intelligent people who take the Hegelian
tradition seriously [among them Marxist economists, such as David
Ruccio] are just dopes from whom you can
learn nothing at all?)
So I think we ought to cut Dean Roche’s salary, don’t you?
Probably close down the Department of
German, too, and remake it into a Department of German Literary Subjects
Covered in 1960: Middle High
German, Goethe, Heine, that sort of thing, right? I mean, Roche
sometimes doesn’t do normal, mainstream,
conventional work. Terrible. Of course I’ve not actually read any of
his work. I’m too busy meeting with deans
and provosts to engage seriously with his scholarship. But like Roche,
Kantor, and the rest I know without
reading what constitutes academic excellence: Normal work. The
average. The mainstream. Preferably what
has been done in the field ever since 1960: no novelties, please. And I
have a really neat measure in which I ask
normal, average people who have not read a serious book outside their
field for thirty years to tell me what kind
of work they like best. No need to read and consider. Calculate the
outcomes of a corrupted scientific
hierarchy; measure out-of-date scholarship, incompetently.
The Provost at Notre Dame, Nathan Hatch, is a distinguished
historian of American religion. Anything
strange there? Well, his main book is about the democratization of
American religion. Power to the
parishioners (Boston Catholics, take note). But not power to the
professors, I guess. The Dean of the Graduate
School as I said is a chemical engineer. None of these people, except
the Chair, Richard Jensen, knows anything
about social statistics, which is what the mindless rankings they depend
on are. Probably Jensen doesn’t actually
know anything about survey research itself, since few economists do. I
wonder if any of the Notre Dame
administrators intent on killing off abnormality in their Department of
Economics know of the survey of journal
rankings in economics done around 1980 that inserted two fictitious
journals with hard-to-mistake names into
the list of 100 or so. It will surprise no one who believes that you
actually have to read science and scholarship
to evaluate it (and, to get technical, that surveys have to be tested
for reliability) that large numbers of those
surveyed claimed to be “familiar” with The Journal of Inapplicable
Theory and The Journal of Idiotic Applied
Stuff (I am making the titles up: will someone give me the exact
references to this piece?), and ranked the theory
journal high, and well above the applied one. Garbage in, academic ruin
out.
Academic economics in the United States has a methodological and
ideological range all the way from M
to N. This is not because it is such a smashing scientific success,
unless you count numbers of mainstream
articles certified by mainstream scientists as “success.” Real insight
into the economy does not come from
existence theorems buttressed by statistical significance, that is, the
cargo-cult method of Samuelsonian
economics. Insight comes from the dwindling number of individual
economists and sometimes whole
departments of economics (fortunately the political scientists,
sociologists, and policy mavens are taking up the
slack) who think, as the present Department of Economics at Notre Dame
does (wait a while), that economics is
the study of the economy and is a part of the conversation of humankind.
Works Cited
Drucker, Peter. 1989. “What Business Can Learn from Nonprofits."
Harvard Business Review 67 (Jul/Aug
1989): 88-93.
McCloskey, Deirdre. 2001. How to Be Human* *Though an Economist. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901
