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I would like to make several points pertinent to this discussion, with no pretension of
solving the issues that comprise the questions being taken up.
 
1. Roy is absolutely correct:  anyone seeking a PhD in economics must become trained to
teach the courses now being taught [I am aware of the inexorable tension between
curriculum planned courses and professorial syllabi]--a horses for courses approach--and
be able to undertake contemporary practice in research.  I had for many years told
students that they must avoid being untrained--Veblen's trained incapacity--if they were
to lead happy professional lives.  They could also do HET and heterodox work.  This would
also apply to someone in a doctoral program in philosophy of science or intellectual
history, history of science, etc.
 
And I, too, prefer HET being embedded in economics--for those who want it to be so for
them.
 
2. I have mixed feelings about the 'highly critical and confrontational stance toward the
mainstream of the discipline' being a 'mistake.'  I have probably made some contribution
to this situation, though I have tried to be constructive and not nasty--though for some
mainstreamers, just being different is enough to condemn you.  If the mainstream really
accepted the role of criticism--called for by the dominant theory of science and by much
else--which is really the notion of competition, and if both mainstreamer and critic
really understood Kuhn's notion of
normal science, the situation would be healthier.  [A comparable situation centers on the
role of sports editor:  he or she wants the freedom to criticize but the athletic programs
wants cheerleaders.] Whig history should be anathema to any serious scholar; such should
be Fred's and Manuel's point.  [On this general topic, see chapter 3, on the treatment of
historiographic issues in HET textbooks, in Samuels, K. Johnson, M. Johnson, and Willie
Henderson, ESSAYS ON THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS, Routledge, forthcoming.]
 
3. I have promoted methodological pluralism and theoretical pluralism, seemingly with
limited if any serious success.  Status emulation, myopia and hubris run rampant in our
field--and others as well; which is only to say we are human beings.
 
4. I also sympathize with what Roy wrote about not supervising dissertations on subjects
on which one is ignorant or seriously inexpert.  But I am not as strongly opposed; e.g.,
no one but a fool would undertake supervision that reasonably could be called
'intellectually impossible' and 'professional dereliction.'  Short of that, however, we
can and should be able and ready to learn.  I have learned much from supervisees and from
the work needed to help them--even on subjects to which I was not personally sympathetic.
If a Duke labor economist [Roy's example] who is not heterodox does not know the heterdox
side of his or her field, I would consider that a serious
problem. 
 
5. I am impressed with Dave's sense of greater pluralism in economics and the parallel
decline of hard core neoclassicism.  Time will tell. The situation is nevertheless less
pluralistic then when I entered the
discipline. 
 
6. I am not impressed with leading economists who in private, and occasionally in public,
will lament the decline of pluralism in economics departments and programs--but then do
nothing about it.
Paul Samuelson has written, "Everywhere and at all times most humans are social cowards"
(p. 49 of Editing Economics:  Essays in Honour of Mark Perlman.  Edited by Hank Lim,
Ungsuh K. Park and G. C. Harcourt, New York:  Routledge, 2002); how true, alas.
 
7.  Nor am I impressed with courses which, in the name of doctoral instruction, teach only
very recent work--published, say, within the last few years.  The students are learning
only a thin slice of the field--often the one undertaken by their instructor--and not the
field as a whole; this leads to progressive narrowing and thinning of the field.  I have
discussed this too with leading specialists, but they too have done nothing about it.
 
Apropos of points 6 and 7, if half a dozen, perhaps fewer, leading departments undertook
to reverse their practice, the content of economics would change--in my view, for the
better, even if I were 100 percent orthodox.
 
Warren J. Samuels 
Michigan State University 
 
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