Times Are Tough

18 August 2009 at 2:06 pm Peter G. Klein 2 comments

| Peter Klein |

At the University of Southern Mississippi, which is responding to the economic crisis by eliminating its economics department (Tomas Sjostrom via Sandeep Baliga). Even tenured faculty will go

Stanford dumped its Food Research Institute (where a good friend of mine was employed) about a decade ago, also terminating the contracts of tenured economists, though not in response to a particular external event (as far as know). I’m sure there are other examples. Thank goodness it wasn’t sociology!

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Education, Institutions.

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2 Comments Add your own

1. Nancy F. | 18 August 2009 at 3:33 pm

Economists have a hard time understanding that popular sentiment implicates them in the financial crisis. Obama is only entrenching such perceptions. Perhaps given the current price of sociologists and policy experts I would rate them ‘outperform’.
2. REW | 19 August 2009 at 1:45 pm

I see that the grand plan at USM was for economics to be moved from the College of Business to Arts and Letters, with existing faculty and their salary lines to be transfered. The USM “business economists” refused. There are other universities where the B-school has discovered the merits of expelling the economists. Often, the economists go gleefully, until they realize the hazard of going from being the poorest paid department in the B-school to being the highest paid department in Arts.