Monday 7 November 2011

Student protest at Harvard

Students have walked out of Gregory Mankiw's first year economics lectures at Harvard to protest about what the event organizers call a class that promotes a “strongly conservative neoliberal ideology.” Now I can't help but think that "conservative neoliberal" is an oxymoron. Consider that F A Hayek, one of the leading neoliberal economists of his day, wrote an essay on "Why I'm Not a Conservative" and Milton Friedman also called this ideas liberal, not conservative (see the introduction to "Capitalism and Freedom").

Anyway here is Greg Mankiw being interviewed on NPR about the protest.



When I did first year political science we were lectured by an out and out Marxist, should I have walked out in protest because of the "Marxist ideology" being promoted in the class?

I didn't because the classes really were fun.

1 comment:

Seamus Hogan said...

Paul,

I took the same course from the same Marxist lecturer (albeit one year after you, I think). I too didn't walk out, but my memory was not that the classes were fun. I like to think that the reason I didn't was that, while posessing numerous character flaws, being a self-righteous twat was not among them.