We need a history of external pressures and unscrupulous methods: from Keynes' misrepresentations of Pigou, to the Veritas Foundation, to an economist flying 3000 miles to petition a Dean to sack an historian of economics, to interventions in promotion exercises (e.g. the John Birch Austrians against Klein), to threats made to publishers, to corrupt anonymous referees' reports. 

Suggestions? Information?  

----- Original Message -----
From: "E. Roy Weintraub" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, 19 December, 2014 12:57:09 AM
Subject: Re: [SHOE] Early 20th Century Principles of Economics Texts

​Backhouse wrote​


​"
Further evidence is that someone did a survey in the early 1950s, and when
teachers in dozens of universities were asked whether they knew of any
institution where a textbook had been changed because of external pressure,
no-one gave any examples. People might have an incentive to deny that their
own institution had responded to political pressure, but would they not
report what they had heard about other places?
​"​

​The survey was published (1958) as The Academic Mind, by Paul Lazarsfeld
and ​Wagner Thielens, Jr. The survey was done two years earlier. It is a
bit later than the Tarshis/Samuelson issue, but the question asked was as
Roger noted. That people gave no examples however is not meaningful in the
context of that particular survey which asked more general questions, and
invited the 2,451 social scientists at 165 colleges and universities to
comment on particular questions if they wished to do so. Specifically,
since no question mentioned textbooks or other teaching materials, there
were no prompts that would have led to any comments.

-- 
E. Roy Weintraub
Professor of Economics
Fellow, Center for the History of Political Economy
<http://hope.econ.duke.edu/>
Duke University
www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html
https://www.facebook.com/FindingEquilibriumDuppeWeintraub
<http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10206.html>