When I was at the University of Washington in the mid-70's it was known as Little Chicago, or Chicago Northwest. (To be fair, half the dept was that way, fighting a war with the other half who didn't seem to notice they were losing.)
It was not however like capitalism. My Soviet econ prof described with Cold-War disgust the exams at Moscow State University: the dept handed out twenty questions in advance, and students would practice writing out stock answers from Marx. I thought -- but dared not say -- that that sounded a lot like the University of Washington econ dept. Only substitute Friedman and Becker for Marx. Under those conditions, the mathematical economics courses were a welcome journey into relative sanity. Not enough for me, though. I finally bailed and went to Colorado. >Julio Huato wrote: >> Grad school is like capitalism. > >Hmm. There wasn't much market-style competition within econ. grad >school when I went to it, though maybe things have changed since the >late 1970s. The U of Chicago econ. department is supposed to be >deliberately set up to emulate a market, but I've only heard that >second- or third-hand. (One of my undergrad profs (who went to the U >of C) once got drunk and told us that at the U of C econ dept, the >program was so tough that some grad students committed suicide. And >that seemed to be a good thing.) > >In my experience, the grad-school hierarchy wasn't quite corporate >either. There was a spaced-out chair (who shall remain unnamed) and >the administrative assistant (who ran the department on a day-to-day >basis). Most important decisions were made by committees of profs. As >Michael Perelman notes, it's like a feudal guild, though of course the >guildmasters and -mistresses and journeypeople couldn't use corporal >punishment on us apprentices. Or capital punishment, for that matter. > >Formal democracy played a small role, within prof-run committees. >There was also the informal democracy of graduate students (with the >local chapter of URPE as an organized interest group) and of the >staff. > >Tradition was very important, as you might expect in a guild-like >organization. What the dept did this year was based on what had been >done in previous years, with some minor modification. The more >modification, the more committee meetings or other unpleasantries. So >modifications were avoided, unless they could be snuck in without >anyone objecting. > >Custom was pretty important to determining the dominant ideology. >During the 1950s (Truman-McCarthy era), the Institutionalists who had >dominated UC-Berkeley econ were purged or left town (to avoid the >Loyalty Oath), so that the mathematical neoclassicals took over. As >time progressed, the mathematical types became hegemonic (think Gérard >Debreu). So when I got there, the tradition was set: thou shalt use >math as thy main mode of communication; thou shalt focus entirely on >equilibrium states; etc. (At the U of Chicago, a major commandment >was: thou shalt not question the assumptions of models, unless they go >against the _laissez-faire_ world-view. We didn't have that one.) > >Of course, when Julio wrote >> Grad school is like capitalism,< he was >saying that it can corrupt you but it doesn't always do so. That's >absolutely right. >-- >Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own >way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. > >
