Issue 17, Fall 1999

William A. McEachern, Editor

Grapevine

To have good ideas we need lots of ideas. This issue of "The Grapevine" offers some ideas I came across during my virtual tour of department Web pages.

Most Web pages offer e-mail links to faculty, but Davidson College also provides e-mail addresses for all majors and minors plus many economics graduates.

Middlebury College's department Web site has a link for "Student Publications," mostly research that has been co-authored with faculty members. Another link presents the department's mission statement.

Southeast Missouri State has a Web page entitled Why Study Economics, which in itself is not unusual-as noted, many departments have similar motivators. But a senior economics student wrote this one, and it's pretty good. I like the idea of having a student make the case to other students.

Emory University's department page has a link for issues of interest to minority students. The link offers details about the American Economic Association's minority summer program as well as other campus and external sites of special interest to minorities.

Ohio Wesleyan has the most professional looking homegrown link to economic resources I came across. It is maintained by their university library and is sorted by category (business and industry, demographics, government, international). There is also an ask-the-librarian link. Departments should rely more on library resources in developing and maintaining Web connections.

Arizona's Web site underscores classroom experiments: "Various undergraduate courses, including many Principles sections, utilize student participation in classroom markets to help them learn economics; such is currently being done at only a very small number of other Departments in the country."

Oberlin's home page has a link to "Uproarious Econ Fun!" with links to economic jokes plus some non-economic diversions.

My favorite Web page quote is from Heilbroner's Worldly Philosophers, which appears on Ithaca College's site: "The great economists pursued an inquiry as exciting-and as dangerous-as any the world has ever known. The notions of the great economists were world shaking, and their mistakes nothing short of calamitous."

The best home grown passage I came across appeared as the opening sentence in Kenyon College's description of its major: "...knowledge is always gained by the orderly loss of information; that is, by condensing and abstracting and indexing the great buzzing confusion of information that comes from the world around us into a form which we can appreciate and comprehend."

Indiana University's department, like many others, opens with a picture of the department's home, Wylie Hall. A link on the home page sells T-shirts, coasters, and coffee mugs, all bearing the image of Wylie Hall. The Web site also features a photo album of pictures in and around Wylie Hall. This edifice complex seemed odd at first, but I guess faculty, students, and graduates grow attached to a building.

A number of books and other scholarly works can be found on-line at Drexel's department site. Almost all are out-of-copyright (hence, free) classics, such as The Wealth of Nations and Marshall's Principles.

The University of Hawaii provides a user-friendly undergraduate guide aimed at "describing the rewards of studying economics," while "minimizing bureaucratic frustration." A section on "complaints and grievances" explains what to do "If you feel you got the short end of the stick from some instructor." Much of the guide has this informal tone.

To help students with their writing, the University of Utah's department home page offers links to support resources around the world, including sites at the University of Melbourne, Purdue, and Penn, plus various wordsmiths including an on-line reference to The Elements of Style (www.bartleby.com/141/index.html).

Some departments, such as Swarthmore, provide information about the future availability of courses that are not offered regularly. For example, with Swarthmore's course chart, a student can determine that International Political Economy will not be offered this academic year but will be taught in the Fall of 2000. Information about course offerings really helps students plan ahead.

As you know, some institutions offer an economics major in liberal arts and some in the business school. Some do both. But there are other twist and turns in how the major is offered. For example, the University of North Dakota offers three majors: economics in liberal arts, and, in the business school, banking and financial economics and business economics. The University of Maine also has three degree programs: economics, economics-international affairs, and financial economics. And American University offers majors in economics and in economic theory, and, within each major, students may choose a general or an international track.

Finally, there are many excellent Web sites, and I would be hard pressed to say which one is best. But if you want to consider some useful models in terms of simplicity, content, timeliness, and overall appeal I would make stops at Swarthmore College and the University of Virginia. Both offer the whole package. (In the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledge that I earned a Ph.D. from Virginia in 1975, and the department there has used each edition of my textbook Economics: A Contemporary Introduction, including the just-published Fifth Edition.)

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