Word: gille
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During the late '50's both the number of students taking Ec 1 and the number concentrating in Economics were declining. Since Gill took over course enrollment has soared from 550 to this year's all-time high...
...critique drew mixed reviews. Arthur Smithies, Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy, thought it raised economic issues that deserved to be considered seriously. Several Ec 1 sectionmen and former sectionmen said they agreed completely with its criticisms of the course. But Richard T. Gill '48, lecturer in Economics and administrative head of Ec 1 since 1959, didn't like the critique at all, and his opinion was crucial...
...Gill wasn't ruffled by the sight of a pair of students telling him in print how the course should be run. And though he found the eight pages full of faulty economics, he wasn't worried about the effect of these errors. What bothered him was what he considered the narrowness of the critique's "new left" view of economics. The public "dialogue" its authors insistently demanded was just what Gill wanted to avoid. This is Gill's final year as head of the course and he understandably does not want to leave it in a blaze of artificial...
...month after the critique was issued, it appears to have failed as an instrument of radical reform. At a March 6 Ec 1 staff meeting Gill asked if there was any sentiment for revising the course substantially; only a couple of hands went up. Several of the section men who liked the critique best didn't even bother to attend. Whether the critique succeeded in exposing serious deficiencies in Economics 1 is still an open question...
...Before Gill took over the course in the spring of 1959, he and three others in the Department submitted a massive plan for revising Ec 1 (their outline for the revised course was more than 20 pages long). Gill acted, he says, because "Economics 1 had settled into a rut; the focus was too much on the system in the United States here and now parts of the course got bogged down in diagramatics so that students were learning tools and not much else...