A propos Spiegel's definition of a school as "consisting of a recognized  
leader" with "a closely knit group of followers to exalt and spread the  
doctrines of the master", Sumitra Shah wrote: 
 
> Can one attribute the lack of a Schumpeterian school or even a nucleus of  
> it to such semi-biographical factors? I remember Bob Heilbroner, who was  
> his student at Harvard, saying that Schumpeter never promoted his work  
> among his students and assiduously refrained from assigning his works as  
> readings. But I also remember hearing/reading that Schumpeter was unhappy  
> that he did not leave a 'school' behind. > 
 
Walter Salant told me the same thing, and that his students were frustrated  
that he never told them what he thought, only what others thought. Likewise,  
Richard Goodwin wrote me that Schumpeter "was a curious man, in some ways  
vain, but for example, in his lectures he never mentioned his own work...  
[nor] in his great work on history of theory." 
 
Commenting on my account of how Schumpeter's teaching assistant, Lauchlin  
Currie, despised his reactionary views on the Great Depression, Goodwin told  
me: 
 
"Indeed I thought the faculty at Harvard were a bunch of whited sepulcres;  
and I still think so. While I was there seven professors published a book  
about the Great Depression -- a book of concentrated mumbo-jumbo that has  
been rightly totally forgotten; they were labelled the 7 Wise Men. And it  
included Schumpeter, whom I admire enormously, but who talked the most  
unutterable rubbish at the time... My dismissal of Harvard did not include  
Currie... Fortunately I took Currie's course and it was more or less the  
only good thing I found in the economics faculty... 
 
"About Schumpeter: Currie was wrong, though he had good grounds. As an  
undergraduate, I was a member of a discussion group and for one meeting we  
asked the newly arrived Schumpeter to explain Marx to us. He told us that  
his economics was all wrong, though he had some good ideas. As a youthful  
radical I was furious with him and returned, some years later, full of  
hostility to him. After one year's contact I began to soften and ended up  
being a friend and great admirer. He was a real continental intellectual; he  
loved discussion and would give any amount of time to anyone who, he  
thought, had anything to say. He was a snob and a reactionary, but Paul  
Sweezy and myself were two of his best friends, and he knew we were both  
hopeless reds. For him, in fact, since we both came from banking families,  
we simply illustrated how capitalism would end, not the way Marx said." 
 
Roger Sandilands