Economics

INFORMATION FOR JOB APPLICANTS

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The Department of Economics seeks to fill up to three tenure-track positions. Those in all applied fields may apply and are encouraged to indicate how their teaching interests would fit our existing course offerings and how they may contribute to our support of interdisciplinary programs. Specific fields are less important than potential to excel in the classroom. We are most interested in candidates who are eager to work with very talented undergraduate students in a small-class liberal arts environment. Our 12-member department has made economics one of the most popular fields of study on campus.  Faculty are expected to sustain an ongoing research program. To support that, W&L offers a junior faculty (pre-tenure) leave and sabbatical every 5th year. While we anticipate hiring at the assistant professor level, one position may be filled at the early associate level. For more detail, see applicant information at http://williams.wlu.edu/whatwestudy/econ/.

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. Assurance of diversity among both faculty and students is an ongoing institutional priority. The university offers competitive salaries and excellent benefits. 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 materials must be received by November 15, 2008. Interviews are planned for the 2009 ASSA meetings in San Francisco. W&L is an equal opportunity employer. CONTACT: Carl P. Kaiser, Head, Dept. of Economics, Williams School, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450.

 

The Economics Faculty

For links to information about individual members of the department, go to http://williams.wlu.edu/whoweare/faculty/econ.htm

 
The Economics Major

For description of the Economics Major at W&L, go to pp. 161-165 of the catalog at http://registrar.wlu.edu/catalogs/current/Economics.pdf

Teaching Responsibilities, Teaching Load, and the Academic Calendar

In addition to teaching in their fields, every member of the department is responsible for teaching two or sometimes three sections of introductory courses each year, including principles of economics or introductory statistics.   Members of the department are also expected to periodically staff our two research courses.  The first course, Economics 398, is meant to teach students how to survey a narrowly focused literature, write a review of that literature, and identify viable research questions culminating with a written proposal regarding a research question of their own choosing.  Since this course is topically based it provides an opportunity for instructors to design courses focused on their own research interests.  The second course, Economics 399, is our senior capstone course for which students are expected to carry out and document a research project.  Students are expected to complete the first course with a well-developed research proposal as a starting point for the capstone course.  Most of the instructors’ efforts in this course are devoted to supervising the research carried out by a number of students.

Beginning with the fall term of 2009, the teaching load will average of 5.5 courses per year.  All faculty will alternate between teaching five and six courses per year.  Courses taught each year will be distributed over two twelve-week terms and one four-week spring term.  The four-week spring term offers the opportunity for faculty to be very creative in designing courses that provide students with unique and exciting educational experiences that would not be possible over a long term.  Faculty are also encouraged to develop study abroad courses for this term.

Departmental Course Coverage

Even though with a large department we are able to offer a wide array of courses, there are some areas in which we have not been able to offer courses recently and others in which we would like to be able to offer courses more frequently.  These areas include international finance, open economy macro, money, public finance, the economics of poverty, gender and economics, experimental economics, mathematical economics, history of economic thought, and economic history.  While our primary goal is to attract applicants with the greatest overall potential as teachers and scholars, we welcome applications from those who bring expertise in these areas.  

 

Economics and Interdisciplinary Programs at Washington and Lee

Some members of the department have taken an interdisciplinary approach on selected research projects and as a department we are eager to support programs that offer opportunities for our students to see how insights from other disciplines can complement economic analysis.  The department has been active in interdisciplinary programs across campus.  Members of the department have been involved in some of these programs at the organizational and administrative levels as well as serving as core faculty.  We are most involved with the two largest programs on campus—Environmental Studies and the Shepherd Program for the Interdisciplinary Study of Poverty and Human Capability.  We are also represented on the core faculties of East Asian Studies and African American Studies.  Other programs that would benefit from contributions of economists with the relevant expertise include Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Women’s Studies, and Russian Area Studies. 

Those seeking more detail on interdisciplinary programs can find their web pages by going to “Academics” and then “Departments and Programs” through the university’s web page.  Also, a link to the catalog can be found on the Registrar’s web page at which catalog entries for each individual program can be accessed. 
The Honor System 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
Lee Chapel, 16th January 2004

.....…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.

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.