THE STILL-UNRELEASED Economics visiting committee report has opened the closet door to the Economics Department and to university education as a whole. The time has come to pull out the skeletons rotting there and give them a proper public burial.

For years graduate students have been saying the Economics Department is in sorry shape. They have protested the rigidity of the program, the department's total dependence on neo-classical theory, and its failure to hire radical economists. And they have been disappointed and disgusted with a senior faculty that neither taught nor cared about graduate students and their needs.

So what's new? What's new is that a University visiting committee selected by the Board of Overseers and led by a former member of the Federal Reserve Board inspected the Economics Department last December and found it guilty of all the graduate student's charges--so guilty that the committee wondered whether the department can "effectively function in the future."

Many would argue that the Economics Department has not effectively functioned for years. Given this dismal record the problem is not so much one of the future as of the present.

The visiting committee report recommends that the senior faculty in the Economics Department devote more time to teaching, that the curriculum be reformed to include subjects "not traditionally taught at Harvard," and that more women and minorities be hired to meet affirmative action guidelines.

In contrast to the graduate program, the visiting committee found the undergraduate program in Economics to be in excellent shape, largely because the faculty and teaching fellows spend time teaching students. There is no reason why this cannot be done with equal success on the graduate level.

The committee's proposals are well-founded and the department should implement them immediately. But they do not address the deeper problems in the department and they do not in themselves guarantee any type of reform.

The Economics Department is a collection of some 60 faculty members who have been hired on the basis of their research and their publications in the field of neo-classical economics. Even if the department requires them to devote more time to teaching it is questionable whether they will be capable of it. Graduate students in the department claim that there are only three or four tenured professors who can adequately teach a course.

Teaching problems aside, it is doubtful whether the Economics faculty are willing to accept curriculum reform and the faculty changes it would require. They have a vested interest in rejecting new courses and professors that will challenge the validity of their neo-classical approach and their emphasis on research. The Economics Department has consistently refused to hire radical economists, arguing that they were not academically qualified to receive tenure. But the department has made no systematic attempt to search for what it defines as "qualified" radicals, although they certainly exist and students have certainly asked for them.

Faculty with a different perspective must be hired if the department is to change. The inclusion of alternative methods of analysis in the curriculum and the general exam is the worst sort of farce if the department does not hire professors capable of teaching alternative theories. One Economics graduate student defined the problem last week, saying, "They put Marxist analysis on the last general exam, but there was no one in the department teaching Marxist economics."

JUDGING BY THIS past performance it is doubtful that the Economics Department can reform itself. Its failure to act on the six-month-old visiting committee recommendations is bad enough, but there is even more evidence to indict the department.

James S. Duesenberry, chairman of the Economics Department, told the graduate students last Friday that "the faculty's right to self-perpetuation is a sacred cow" that it "is just not in the cards to change." One student replied that "it is just this sacred cow that we must slay if we are going to change this department."

And he was right. Sacred cows belong to Eastern religions and the right to self-perpetuation was buried with Louis XVI's head over two hundred years ago. It is time the Economics Department and the rest of Harvard's gilded academics understood this and descended from their theoretical nirvanas and research fiefdoms to start teaching students and solving real problems. This is precisely what the visiting committee report recommends.

To effect this change, the Graduate Economics Club voted last Friday to demand that two students sit on all Economics Department hiring committees. This student presence is essential. It is the only way of penetrating the department and forcing the tenured faculty to face its own deficiencies and to recognize student needs.

The Graduate Economics Club also voted to organize a complete student evaluation of the Economics professors and to organize the first meeting ever between them and the graduate students.