Two perspectives on a long and bitter dispute

Two new books explore the intractable divisions that engulfed the economics faculty at Sydney University for much of the past 40 years. Jeremy Gilling reports.

A proper understanding of mainstream economic theory is necessary before any effective critique can be mounted, says Peter Groenewegen. Frank Stilwell agrees, but says it was the proponents of economic orthodoxy who pulled the plug on Sydney University’s brief, three-year experiment in parallel teaching of the two streams in the mid-1980s.

Groenewegen, emeritus professor of economics, and Stilwell, professor of political economy, were key participants in the war that engulfed the university’s economics faculty for much of the past four decades. They have both authored newly released books that deal extensively with the prolonged dispute.

The heart of the dispute lay in the trenchant opposition from the late 1960s of a group of mostly young economists to what they saw as the conservative, pro-market, mathematically formal undergraduate curriculum championed by two recently appointed professors, Warren Hogan and Colin Simkin.

It boiled over in 1971 with the decision by Hogan and Simkin not to renew the contracts of two popular tutors, David Hill (later to become head of the NSW State Rail Authority, and subsequently managing director of the ABC and head of Soccer Australia) and Bill Waters.

It was finally laid to rest with the transfer of political economy to the Faculty of Arts in 2008. The intervening years saw protests, student boycotts, sit-ins, substantial property damage, worldwide media coverage, and repeated interventions by vice-chancellor Bruce Williams and his successor, John Ward, and the university’s senate and academic board.

“The legacy of the dispute has not been wholly bad,” says Groenewegen. “It certainly accelerated the demise of the ‘god professor’ – when the dispute broke out in the early 1970s, formal authority over teaching in universities rested overwhelmingly with professors and professorial boards.

“Now, at least partly as a result of the dispute, we have much more representative academic boards. Authority and decision-making are far less hierarchical.”

It may also, he says, have contributed to the formal separation within the faculty, renamed Economics and Business in 2000, of the more professional disciplines such as accounting, management and industrial relations from the political sciences such as economics and government.

But overall, he says in his book, the costs far outweigh the benefits. These include high academic staff turnover, because talented staff became sick of the interminable, heated and mostly inconclusive departmental meetings and other disruptions to their teaching. He also cites long-term damage to the faculty’s reputation, not least because many of the decisions about its direction were made “by exhaustion” by committees largely comprising academics from outside the discipline.

“The Hogan-Simkin ‘revolution’ could have been handled much better, but it did bring modernity to the teaching of economics,” he says. “The political economy people never really came to grips with this. They argued that the course was too mathematical, but maths is essential to understanding the foundations of the subject – and you can’t effectively criticise the core until you understand it.

“Much of the radical and Marxist critique the political economy people offered was ineffectual for this reason.”

The authors of the second book, Stilwell, Gavan Butler and Evan Jones, say the dispute was “never just a matter of a contest of ideas” within the discipline; it was also “a struggle about students’ and academics’ rights”.

The bulk of their book is devoted to documenting this second facet of the conflict. They argue that the “authoritarian teaching practice” in economics against which they were rebelling was “normal, if not essential” given the orthodox curriculum’s divorce from “the observable character of the real world”.

“If you’re teaching a course built around abstract theories that require students to suspend disbelief, you’re going to have problems in insisting that they pay attention,” says Stilwell. “There have been good and bad teachers on both sides, but because our [political economy] courses offer controversy, debate and relevance, our students are engaged and interested from the outset. We don’t need to impose an authoritarian pedagogy.”

In 1983 the academic board ruled that the department should teach a common introductory course comprising equal parts of microeconomics, macroeconomics and political – an arrangement that lasted until 1986.

“No one was enthusiastic at the time,” recalls Stilwell. “But in retrospect it worked well, and could have provided a lasting solution. Unfortunately, Hogan, Simkin and the then dean, Steven Salsbury – a right-wing Republican from the US – were adamantly opposed to it, and eventually succeeded in scuttling it. Structural pluralism discomfited them.”

Economics was by no means the only discipline – or Sydney the only university – to be ideologically riven in the radicalised 1970s. Philosophy (which also split for a few years into two schools), government and social work were similarly divided.

“[But] the leading figures in the other departments were generally more flexible than in economics, so these disputes were much less bitter and prolonged,” says Groenewegen.

Stilwell believes the dispute lost much of its heat from around the turn of the century as a result of extraneous factors – sharp cuts to university funding during the Howard years, with the consequent pressure to attract international and other full-fee-paying students, resulting in the growing domination of business-related studies at the expense of both mainstream and alternative economics. For a while, both the orthodox and the political economy teachers had to take “service” courses to meet budgetary ends – and, says Stilwell, were similarly uncomfortable in doing so.

Groenewegen offers a wry epitaph to the dispute with his observation that Hogan and Simkin may have done Hill a huge favour by terminating his contract:

“If he’d stayed, he would probably have ended up as a bored and mediocre academic, rather than the distinguished public figure he subsequently became.”

“My dismissal certainly forced me to go out and get a job, and everything else flowed from that – not that I ever really saw myself as a career academic,” says Hill.

“However, I was never a campaigner for political economy. I was certainly critical of the structure of the course we had to teach. Imposing differential calculus on first year economics students was a sure way to turn them off the subject. But I always thought mature adults should be able to find a way through the issue, and put together a fascinating course incorporating the best of both worlds.

“The split was a tragedy, not least because it meant large numbers of political students graduated without knowing the difference between a balance sheet and a profit and loss statement.”

Educating for business, public service and the social sciences: A history of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Sydney by Peter Groenewegen and Political economy now! The struggle for alternative economics at the University of Sydney by Gavan Butler, Evan Jones and Frank Stilwell, are both published by Sydney University Press (2009).