At Harvard, as elsewhere, the adherents of the radical approach have generally been junior professors and graduate students, not the established, tenured members of the economics profession who make the hiring and promotion decisions within their departments. These older, established economists have not been quick to accept radical economics. And so, radical economists have not done well in their climb up the academic ladder.

Since 1969-70, four Harvard radicals have been knocked off the Department ladder. Only one radical, Stephen A. Marglin ’59, professor of Economics, has gained tenure. Marglin received tenure in 1967 for work which he describes as “squarely in the orthodox tradition.”

In December, the Department voted not to recommend Bowles, who had reached the rank of associate professor, for tenure. Shortly after, it decided not to promote another radical, Arthur MacEwan, assistant professor of Economics, to associate professor. The radicals charge that these decisions, and earlier decisions not to promote radicals Herbert Gintis and Thomas Weisskopf, were “inherently political.”

The Department’s decisions not to rehire Bowles and MacEwan received national coverage. Possibly as a result, Gintis was rehired in January as an assistant professor with a guaranteed promotion to the untenured rank of associate professor.

Only about one of 12 assistant professors in Economics receives tenure – most non-radicals are not rehired either. But the radicals contend that their dismissals from the Department have been more than statistical coincidences.

Their political activities, especially in the Department, may have played some role in the decisions. In November 1968, Richard E. Caves, then chairman of the Department, took notice enough of Gintis’s politics as a graduate student to write the chairman of another department in which Gintis was being considered for an appointment: “My impression is that Gintis spends a rather large proportion of his time and energies being New Left.” (A friend of Gintis’s in the other department obtained the letter.)

Caves says he couldn’t “remember all the specifics now” of what activities of Gintis’s he had regarded as New Left. Gintis thinks it could only have been his attempts, with other graduate students, including MacEwan, to have the Marxist Ernest Mandel invited to give a special lecture at Harvard. He says the faculty committee in charge of the lectures had given the Department’s graduate student organization permission to choose some of the lecturers, but that Cave had refused to approve the invitation to Mandel.

Caves denies that he took a position one way or the other on the invitation. He said Mandel was not invited because of an “administrative hassle.”

Since the Mandel issue, graduate students in the Department have demanded a greater voice in hiring and curriculum decisions of the Department. Nearly all the graduate students’ demands, except some concerning the general exams, have been refused. The radical professors have supported all the graduate students’ demands and this, they feel, has made them no friends among the senior members of the Department.

But the radicals see another consideration as much more important in their failures to get promoted. They argue that conventional economists cannot judge radical work fairly, because the conventional economists do not even consider the radicals’ concerns with capitalist institutions to be within the realm of economics.

As the radicals see it, conventional economists study economic behaviour without examining the institutional framework within which that activity takes place, while the radicals’ main concern is precisely to study that framework. The difference between Bowles’s early and later work illustrates the difference: conventional economists study individual decisions to invest in so many years of education while radicals consider the role the educational system plays in maintaining the class structure.

In choosing not to study and question the institutional framework of capitalism, conventional economists are making a political choice, the radicals say. By not questioning this framework, they are maintaining the belief that the structure is basically benign or immutable, or both. And if the conventional economists’ judgments about what economists should study are political, then their judgments about the value of radical work are political, too.

Most senior members of the Department do not see the question in these terms. They see the difference between radical and conventional economics partially as a difference of emphasis, with the radicals emphazising sociological and political questions as well as economic ones. Members of the Department differ as to the place of such questions in economics, but do not see their opinions on this issue as ideologically determined.

They point out that some non-radical sociologists and economists have, like Bowles, studied the influence of class background, I.Q., and education on success. And they feel it is quite possible to judge this empirical work by non-ideological standards.

They classify Bowles’s characteristically radical conclusions about the role of the educational system in the class structure as speculation, not economics. To the radicals, of course, the working out of these conclusions is the most important part of their work. In the eyes of conventional economists, these conclusions may not detract from the radicals’ work, but they add little to its professional quality. This judgment, from their point of view, is not ideological, but scientific.