I'm sorry to hear that NYU has dropped the requirement of History of 
Economic Thought from its Ph.D. program, but it is a trend that has been 
going on in both undergraduate and graduate programs. The unfortunate 
part is that students don't learn how to appreciate and carry on scholarly 
debate among individuals who hold different paradigms or views in most 
economics courses. A HET class taught well and openly provide students 
with an opportunity to appreciate different world-views and to develop 
skills of how to carry out scholarly discussion that listens to others 
and to question their own world-view. The opportunity cost of not having 
classes like HET, in my opinion, is extremely high. I'm writing a paper 
where I argue that Thomas Kuhn's book _The Structure of Scientific 
Revolutions_ actually has caused a lot of harm by emphasizing paradigm 
shifts instead of focusing on the importance of having a number of 
equally important and viable paradigms existing simultaneously in a 
particular discipline and having those in the discipline learning how 
the area of knowledge in that discipline can grow because of this, 
instead of just focusing of throwing out one paradigm and replacing 
it with another. 
-Ric Holt