Teaching economics — a £9,000 lobotomy
June 5, 2014 Leave a comment
all too relevant – change is going to be slow…
In their battle to open up economics, [students] have one hell of a fight on their hands, for the same reason that it has proved so hard to democratise so many aspects of the post-crash order: the forces of conservatism are just too powerful. To see how fiercely the academics fight back, take a look at the University of Manchester.
Since last autumn, members of the university’s Post-Crash Economics Society have been campaigning for reform of their narrow syllabus. They’ve put on their own lectures from non-mainstream, heterodox economists, even organising evening classes on bubbles, panics and crashes.
You might think academics would be delighted to see such undergraduate engagement, or that economists would be swift to respond to the market.
Not a bit of it. Manchester’s economics faculty recently announced that it wouldn’t renew the contract of the temporary lecturer of the bubbles course, and that students who wanted…
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About Damian Merciar
