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Economics fails to achieve excellence
To the Editor:
A ranking of faculty research productivity in economics has just been released at http://www.econphd.net/rankings.htm. It claims to be "among the most substantial in scope" and "unique in detail," and includes a "size-adjusted" measure of productivity.
Among the 199 departments ranked internationally through 2003, UB's Department of Economics does not even make it into the rankings.
We often claim to be the flagship SUNY institution. Yet SUNY-Albany appears at 147 and SUNY-Binghamton at 151. Among other U.S. public institutions, University of California-San Diego is No. 12; University of Illinois-Urbana is 23; Ohio State, 25; Michigan and Michigan State, 26 and 30, respectively; Indiana University, 48; Rutgers, 56; Iowa and Iowa State, 70 and 71, respectively; University of California-Santa Cruz, 88; North Carolina State, 100; University of Kentucky, 111; University of Wyoming, 132; University of California-Riverside, 169; and Southern Illinois, 194.
The list goes on.
Back in 1989, an article in the Journal of Economic Education (J. Tschirhart, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 199-222) ranked economics departments in the United States on a per-capita publication basis, using 1975 to 1984 data. In its data, corrected by a measure of journal quality, UB ranked 27—ahead of every single university mentioned above, except San Diego.
Our department has had some difficulties, but that excuse lost its cogency quite a while ago. The UB economics department has not even seriously attempted to hire at the senior-faculty level for the past decade and a half, and has left its Goodyear Chair unoccupied. Once in a while, an ad for senior faculty is posted, but no offers are made—this past academic year being just one more example. UB seems satisfied with hires of new assistant professors, regular or visiting, and with the same person chairing economics recruitment year after year.
Is the economics department an isolated case of academic failure in the university? It would be interesting to know how far other departments have fallen or progressed toward academic excellence—to know with what we are dealing in any effort to turn UB around.
Sincerely,
Paul Zarembka
Professor
Department of Economics