----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]