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