The New York Times reports today on liberal academics facing discrimination at the hands of conservatives on college campuses across the nation. Institutions of higher learning have allowed their economics departments to persecute “heterodox” economists just because they “do not rely on mathematical modeling” in their study of economics.
According to his estimates, 5 to 10 percent of America’s 15,000 economists are heterodox, which includes an array of professors on the right and the left (post-Keynesians, Marxists, feminists and social economists).Heterodox economists complain that they are almost completely shut out by their more influential neoclassical colleagues who dominate most American university departments and prestigious peer-reviewed journals that are essential to gaining tenure.
Heterodox economists have strayed from mainstream market economic theory because, as UC-Berkeley professor and former Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich said, they “want to speak to the reality of our time.”
That “reality,” of course, relies on rhetoric, not data. It’ll be quite the day when liberals rule not only their safe-havens in the other social sciences (Anthropology, Poli Sci, Sexuality and Gender Studies, etc.) but Economics, which has always prided itself on being a more objective and fact-based discipline.