NOBEL LAUREATE Wassily W. Leontief's announcement last week that he would leave Harvard's Economics Department to take a post at New York University is the latest and possibly the saddest in a series of indications that the department has serious problems.

Leontief, in his 44 years of teaching here, has been one of the few professors who consistently attempted to challenge the Fe Department's tunnel vision toward neo-classical theory, its aversion to reform, and its discrimination against minorities and women. He is also one of the last.

His resignation underscores the Visiting Committee's report of last spring--and the complaints of countless graduate students before it--that a "strong sense of alienation" exists in the department, that a "hostile and distrusting" atmosphere pervades faculty-students relationships and that discrimination against radical economists, women and minorities is a long tradition. The departure highlights even further the salient question posed by the committee whether the department can "effectively function in the future."

Decisions by faculty to leave this University are seldom simple, and undoubtedly there are more factors than Leon tief's agreement with the Visiting Committee's findings that made him decide to "vote with his feet." But it is hard to see how one could retain hope in a department whose chairman holds that the "faculty's right to sell perpetuation is a sacred cow," and that "it is just not in the cards to change."

Change is what is sorely needed in the Economics Department--changes in curriculum, in hiring practices and in the atmosphere of student faculty relations. And if change is not in the cards, someone had better find a new deck--before the sound of valuable professors voting with their feet against the department's practices becomes the sound of a stampede.