Word: marglin
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CAMBRIDGE WILL BE a little lonelier next year for Stephen A. Marglin '59, Harvard's only tenured radical economist. Arthur MacEwan, who has been the other radical economist since Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis were shown the door in 1972, is leaving town. He too has been denied tenure. Even sympathetic liberals, like John Kenneth Galbraith and Wassily Leontief, seem an endangered species. So Marglin will be almost alone in his challenges to mainstream economics and, more than ever, he will seem the Economics Department's bright-boy-gone...
...Marglin can't pinpoint any single experience that radicalized him and established him as the department pariah, but at 37, he is getting used to that role. The dark, wiry activist has survived five years with the reputation of someone who once did respectable work, who won tenure in 1967 as a "straight," but who emerged as a closer Marxist shortly after. He wasn't surprised or hurt when James S. Duesenberry, chairman of the Economics Department, implied that Marglin and MacEwan were politicians, not economists, at a debate in April. The 700 spectators in the Science Center winced...
...When Marglin first came to Harvard in 1955, he never dreamed that he would become a radical professor of economics, or any kind of professor at all. He was a football player--a fullback--and a swimmer from Hollywood High School in Los Angeles. His father was a salesman, and he wanted to be a U.S. senator...
...Marglin almost didn't get by at first. He played freshman football behind a high school all American, and his schoolwork those first few months was "uniformly sad, if not disastrous. I just didn't have any notion of how to write a paper or anything like that." He realized that of his two collapsing careers, only his academics were salvageable, so after football ended his work improved dramatically. But the adjustment period was painful, and Marglin, who says he has never made friends easily, remembers his freshman year as "pretty dismal in almost every...
What irritated him then and angers him now was the way Harvard worked to make him "conform to an elite mold--socially, politically, Christ, in so many ways." The pressure to conform went beyond clothes and into studies. Marglin realized after he discovered economics his freshman year. "The main thrust around here was how complicated life was, and how you should be deferential to authority," he says. "Mary wasn't worth studying because he was simplistic. My first economics course spent two days on Mary, which is the way Protestantism is taught in Catholic schools. It was taught as heresy...