Economics

INFORMATION FOR JOB APPLICANTS

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WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY, Lexington, VA

All Applied Micro Fields E, F3, F4 Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics or International Finance

The Department of Economics seeks to fill up to three tenure-track positions beginning with the 2008 fall term. Those with applied micro fields that fit the department’s current coverage are encouraged to apply. Applicants should indicate how their teaching interests would fit our existing course offerings. Specialty is less important than total excellence and potential. For one position we invite applications from candidates with primary fields in macroeconomics and monetary economics and/or international finance. While we anticipate hiring at the assistant professor level, one position may be filled at the associate level.

Washington and Lee University is a nationally-ranked institution with 1750 students located in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Hallmarks of the institution are its honor system and faculty collegiality. Within the 100-yearold Williams School of Commerce, Economics and Politics, our 12-member department has made economics one of the most popular fields of study on campus. We are most interested in candidates with an intellectual orientation and research and teaching interests appropriate to working with very talented undergraduate students in a small-class liberal arts environment.

The university offers competitive salaries and excellent benefits, including paid leaves for junior as well as tenured faculty. Applications from female and minority candidates are encouraged. Send via regular mail a cover letter, curriculum vitae, graduate transcripts, three letters of recommendation, a statement of teaching philosophy and interests, evidence of teaching effectiveness if available, and one piece of scholarly writing. For full consideration application files must be complete by November XX, 2007. Interviews are planned for the 2008 ASSA meetings in New Orleans, LA. An equal opportunity employer. CONTACT: Carl P. Kaiser, Head, Dept. of Economics, Williams School, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450 (Fax: 540-458-8639; email: kaiserc@wlu.edu).

 

Teaching Responsibilities

In addition to teaching in their fields, every member of the department is responsible for teaching two or sometimes three introductory courses each year, including principles of economics and introductory statistics. At this time our greatest need is for new faculty who would be comfortable teaching statistics on a regular basis. We also hope that one of our new faculty members would be interested in offering one section of mathematical economics each year.

 

Teaching Load and Academic Calendar

The current teaching load is six courses per year taught over two twelve-week terms and one six- week spring term. However, the president of Washington and Lee University has put forth a proposal to reduce our teaching load to five and half courses per year and to shorten the spring term to four weeks during which students will take only one course. On average, faculty will teach alternate spring terms. The spring term offers the opportunity for faculty to be very creative in designing innovative courses that provide students with unique and exciting educational experiences that would not be possible over a long term.

 

Honor at Washington and Lee University

The Honor System at Washington and Lee is unique; there is no other quite like it. Presented below is an excerpt from a recent address given by President Emeritus Robert E.R. Huntley. His comments capture the essence of our honor system and indicate the centrality and defining importance of honor to the character of this institution:

Oasis of Honor: The Importance of Honor in a World of Eroding Morality
An Address by Robert E. R. Huntley, BA 1950 LLB 1957 LLD 1984
At the Founders’ Day Convocation/Keynote for the Symposium of the Institute for Honor

............You here at W & L are part of a very special community, not only a community in quest of educational excellence, admirable as that may be. Over the years I have known and talked with thousands of our alumni. Almost all cite living in this community of honor as the single most important and lasting feature of their W & L experience. Why? Not just because of its convenience. Honesty is not part of this community because it is the best policy. We badly deprecate it when we refer to it as a policy.

It may be convenient but it is not for convenience that we embrace to it. The sense of being a part of a special group, a special community based on shared trust was to the alumni and students I have known its most vital feature. To know that you live with others who trust you and who expect you to trust them provides a kind of character strengthening which for many instills or reinforces habits of the heart that last a lifetime.

Professor Lad Sessions of the W & L Department of Philosophy has written a lucid analysis of an honor code like the one here. He notes that there are several different concepts of honor - he identifies three basic ones: Conferred Honor, Positional Honor, and Personal Honor. In his analysis our code is a subset of Personal Honor, which he calls Moral Honor. Some forms of honor may stand at odds with morality, and may not be admirable at all. But Moral Honor is based upon an honor code that upholds and is constrained by morality, by moral principles. Even so, Professor Sessions says, “ Honor [in this sense] isn’t reducible to morality . . . . because of its social context - it is loyalty to a particular group of people who mutually recognize one another’s commitment to each other and the sense of honor they all share.” There is, he opines, a “vitality and a depth of personal commitment that undergirds commitment to the moral rules...loyal[ty] to particular people as well as to universal principles. Moral honor, therefore, has at least the potential of deepening moral commitment.” He continues: “Such groups or communities may well be unusual in history ... and to create and preserve them may require the concerted effort of many people over considerable time.”i

The honor system here is therefore a most extraordinary creature, maybe even unique. These are its central elements - the ones upon which it depends for its existence.

(1)
It is not an effort to discipline student conduct. Disciplinary matters are left to others to devise and administer with students playing only a supporting role. Therefore it is simple and readily intelligible by all who wish to trust it: it applies to lying, cheating and stealing, and nothing else.
(2)
Authority for it and over it is entrusted directly and exclusively to the student body with only supporting roles played by the faculty and administration, who have no authority to modify or repeal it. There are no appointed honor police - and each student must feel the obligation to uphold and enforce it.
(3)
There is only one result of a finding by the student authority that a member of the student community has broken trust by lying, cheating, or stealing. That result is permanent exclusion from the community.
(4)
The community is a small one. While nothing suggests some specific size, it must be small enough so that its participants can sense their fellowship with it, their trust in it, and their obligation to it. Remember: it survives on trust, not on fear.
Over the years, in almost every student generation, these elements are examined and questioned. It is inevitable that they will be. I have witnessed and participated in literally dozens of soul wrenching reexaminations, as a student, as a faculty member, and as president - in the late sixties and early seventies, for example, when every institution in America, and here, was vigorously challenged by students. But the system emerged intact, with I believe even renewed strength.

Every newcomer to our school (student, faculty or administrator) can be expected to question it. Why? Simply because they have not encountered one like it elsewhere, and we are all inclined to favor things we are familiar with and eschew that which is unique in our experience. I shall mention briefly the most common challenges I have encountered:

(1)
Challenge: If it works so well why don’t we apply it to other forms of egregious and unwanted misconduct? Answer: The tacit bond we give each other must retain a quality of childlike simplicity, applying only to those acts that plainly attack our trust in each other. If it should be applied as a behavioral corrective, it will quickly become like all other legislated disciplinary systems. One need only look elsewhere to see how well they work.
(2)
Challenge: To give exclusive authority to the students is patent non-sense. A student generation is but a fleeting moment in the life of this two century old school. Answer: The system depends on the student willingness to yield a measure of each one’s personal sovereignty to the group. This will not occur unless students are in charge.
(3)
Challenge: The single sanction is Draconian. No other place imposes such a penalty for simple lying, cheating or stealing. We have no right to blight the life of a fellow student for one mistake; give ‘em another chance. Don’t be so judgmental. Answer: This system of trust depends upon the knowledge of each student that others have accepted it. An act of lying, cheating, or stealing betrays that trust and breaches the commitment each student makes to all other students to participate faithfully. The Honor System here is not intended to rehabilitate those who by their conduct reject it but rather to maintain it for those who accept it. The exclusion of a student who demonstrates an unwillingness to accept the obligation of trust is not a sanction, because it is not intended as a penalty. It presupposes and presumes each student’s ability to govern and control his or her own actions as to lying, cheating, or stealing. It is the logical consequence of conduct which demonstrates rejection . We do not intend to blight the lives of those who are excluded and we go to great lengths not to do so. We are a tiny community, one of thousands of school and university groups here and abroad. Exclusion does not prevent an excluded student from joining another such group, and the record is replete with examples of those who have done so successfully.
(4)
Challenge: The school’s size is a relative matter. Other colleges and universities have grown by leaps and bounds in recent decades. Increased size is essential to achieving the recognition we deserve. Answer: Maybe so. But for the honor system as we know it to work, size is not relative to public relations requirements, budgetary requirements, or the comparable sizes of other good schools. The community must be small enough for its members to sense it dimensions and feel affinity for each other member; this is a requirement that is internally generated and does not flex significantly by reference to external factors.
It would be rational to conclude that the honor system is not worth such a high price. Most places that attempted honor systems like this one must have in effect so concluded. You can no doubt infer from my remarks, I believe it is quite well worth it.

You who enter W & L today face a far sterner challenge than did those of us who came here as students say 50 years ago. To put it in personal terms, I went through a large public high school of 2000 students and have no recollection of seeing any one cheat or knowing of anyone cheating.. I rode my bicycle to school each day and left it in a rack without a lock, with no thought that it would be stolen. In four years it never was. The school had no honor system as such; but the beliefs about right behavior, habitual with most of us, sufficed to provide a measure of honest behavior. We knew that dishonesty existed but it did not define or intrude on our daily lives in the way it now may.

Even so, the Honor System to me as a student here in the forties was the most notable feature of my W & L experience. Young people - indeed all people - desperately need a sense of being committed to something beyond self, something that is a vital part of their daily lives but is at the same time more important than personal success or even so-called self-fulfillment. A commitment of trust and an obligation of honesty to others in a finite, identifiable community goes far in supplying this human need at the very moment in young lives when it is most effective. From it comes in time a most important pair of character traits: earned self-respect and habitual respect for others. From it also may come a sense of obligation, a willingness to accept personal responsibility, and as former W & L president Frank Gaines once put it, a commitment to “something a little higher than competence.”

If it was important in the lives of those who were part of this community in years gone by, it must be vastly more precious because vastly rarer today. Now it is like an oasis in a world when many around us seem to have discarded their belief in the virtue of honorable conduct and trustworthiness, and accept personal responsibility only for their own gratification. Many appear to value unearned self love (sometimes called self esteem) above self respect. One who has the privilege of being a committed part of this community of trust - this Oasis of Honor - is rarely going to make a blunder like that.

Especially is it fitting to pause to consider the value of our honor system on this day. The time of this ceremony is set to commemorate the birthday of that founder whose statue lies behind me. It is fitting that we do so. It was he who salvaged this school from certain ruin after the Civil War. In the five years given him, he set it on the course which has sustained it ever since. And it is to his influence we trace our commitment to moral honor.

This code of honor, this community of trust, must be constantly nurtured. It has not and will not survive merely because it has a tradition of scores of decades. Despite its age and the respect in which it is held by generations of alumni, it could die in a single student generation. And once dead it could no more be revived than it could be begun anew at some institution that never practiced it. In short, it is yours to care for, the most precious heritage this old school will give you - and by far the most important thing you can give it.

Robert E. R. Huntley January 2004

i Sessions, William Ladd 2002, Draft, Three Concepts of Honor p15