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Fred's response I'm afraid (and with apology) reflects my failure to explain clearly what
the Duke dissertation process entails (as noted too by Mat).
 
We require our students to write a dissertation in economics. Necessarily given our
strengths in various areas of economics, and our desire that our students be recognized as
health economists, or resource economists, or international trade economists, etc. as well
as historians of economics, we require that they do professional level economic research.
We encourage our HOPE students to include a chapter of serious history in those theses, a
chapter that is publishable to HOPE standards. We would not preclude a history of a
heterodox "take" on a subject, but heterodox economics is not, itself, historical
scholarship. (See the first HES-List editorial in which I made a
case about the standards we should use to appraise research in the history of economics.)
There can be good historical work done about heterodox economics, and bad historical work.
Fred himself, in a session at HES 2003, heard two
interesting historical papers on heterodox economics by De Rouvrey and Mata, papers that
were themselves good exemplars of doctoral level historical research and interpretation.
 
Fred is clearly concerned that we do not "allow" students to do heterodox dissertations.
Our labor economists are not heterodox, so why should they supervise research they are
ignorant about, and thus unable to "supervise?" As a department we take research
supervison seriously; we do not ever permit our students to do dissertations that we
cannot usefully supervise. Last year we refused to permit a HOPE-wannabie student to do a
thesis chapter proposal on a
subject in the history of Chinese economic thought. None of us knows anything about that
topic, so supervision, and research guidance, would have been intellectually impossible,
and thus professional dereliction.
 
All that said, perhaps some still would wish that students be able to freely write on any
subject of their choice. That kind of educational system is not characteristic of any
Ph.D. program in any field of which I am aware. The
reason we have "thesis committees" and "thesis proposals" and "thesis defenses" is to
fulfill our obligations to scholarship, not freedom of belief.
 
  
E. Roy Weintraub 
Duke University 
 
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