----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- Roy - I am trying to figure out from your interesting reply exactly what the answer is to my question. Is it 1) that the HET faculty at Duke are very involved in things (teaching, inter-disciplinary work) that take their time away from supervising dissertations and that also might veer the students too far away from mainstream economics?; and/or that 2) the HET faculty feel that their own and the department's grant success (and rank and reputation generally) may be hurt by being perceived as too "touchy-feely," i.e. not technical, formal enough? Regarding your last paragraph, note that I only asked why the Duke department disallowed dissertations in the HET, not why they didn't allow approaches critical of the mainstream or problems to be approached from alternative paradigms. Is the HET itself by its very nature critical of the mainstream and/or too open to alternative erspectives? Or is it just that the kind of HET done at Duke is "non-mainstream HET" so it would clash too much with the rest of the program? Thanks for your replies. I have ordered the HOPE special issue you mentioned to try to see if some of this is explained there. Best, Mat Forstater ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]