Brown's five newest economics professors will do more than simply enrich their own department - they will also offer increased interdisciplinary opportunities.
The new courses these professors will teach reflect the University's commitment to multidisciplinary studies, a central element of President Ruth Simmons' Plan for Academic Enrichment. In addition, a newly offered concentration - Commerce, Organization and Entrepreneurship - encompasses many of these classes. Two of the new professors were hired under the Plan.
"Last year we managed to hire a lot of quite extraordinary people," said Professor Andrew Foster, chair of the department. "There's almost always more turnover (in economics) than in most other departments," he said.
Foster said the department usually hires just two associate professors each spring after whittling down an applicant pool of as many as 400 during the intense four-month application process. Attracting distinguished scholars involves keeping an eye out for senior-level academics who might be interested in moving, he said.
Professor Glenn Loury is one of those scholars. Loury comes to Brown this year from Boston University and will teach EC137: "Race" in Spring 2006.
"(Brown) has a lot of people who are interested in my area of study - race and inequality. I have a feeling it will be relatively easy to get support and raise money for the kind of work I want to do and have a kind of institutional enthusiasm that I didn't have at BU," Loury said. "(Brown) is a more interesting venue in which to pursue my interests."
Among Loury's recent papers is an analysis of the use of non-race based criteria to achieve racial balance in universities. His work suggests that there are race-neutral ways to help schools admit a higher number of minority students. As an example, Loury cites legislation in Texas that requires public universities to admit every student in the top 10 percent of their graduating high school class. Loury says this legislation can increase the number of black and Latino students accepted more than altering standards for test scores and extra-curricular activities.
"It's about changing your policy in a way that is on its face race-neutral, but can increase the number of minority students in your class," Loury said, emphasizing that his course will also explore inner city poverty, prisons and the "political, social and economic structures that are in this particular brand of inequality."
This year will also be the first time that an undergraduate concentration in Commerce, Organization and Entrepreneur-ship is offered at Brown. COE is sponsored by the departments of Economics, Sociology, and Engineering, and will require concentrators to take courses from all three departments. Within the concentration students will focus on one of three areas - business economics, organizational studies or entrepreneurship and technology management.
Maria Carkovic, who has taught at the universities of Virginia and Minnesota, will serve as the new administrative director of COE. Carkovic will also teach EC150: "Current Global Economic Challenges," which will explore the relationships between economic problems in the United States, Japan, Europe, China and other emerging economies.
"COE is an interdisciplinary concentration that includes economics, sociology and engineering to give people tools to have the managerial side as well as the technological side for exploiting their ideas," Carkovic said. "What we're offering is a more organized and hopefully better-integrated way of keeping an eye on the business world, so that (concentrators are) better prepared to hit the ground running when they join the labor force."
Eventually, COE will replace the Business Economics, Engineering and Economics, and Public and Private Sector Organizations concentrations, though Carkovic could not say when that would happen.
Other new economics courses include EC79: "Business, Economics and Ethics," EC171: "Fixed Income Securities," a re-developed EC160: "Economics of the Middle East" - taught by Yona Rubenstein, a visiting professor from Tel Aviv University - and an urban economics course . The latter, taught by Nathaniel Baum Snow, a professor from the University of Chicago, will be part of the Special Structures in the Social Sciences Initiative.
Professor Ross Levine is coming to Brown from the business school at the University of Minnesota and will offer a new course on financial institutions. According to Foster, the absence of such a course has been a major weakness in Brown's business economics curriculum, especially in light of the development of COE.
"(These courses) are representative of the new things that are going on in the economics department. We have been encouraged to think about (finding) ways of interaction with other units on campus. There's always been a feeling that economics has a lot to offer different programs around the University - in the health sector, or the education sector, for example," Foster said.
"The point is, economics is a discipline in which it makes sense to have links to other institutions on campus," he said, citing Levine's connection with the Watson Institute for International Studies as one example. "We really managed to hire people who can help increase the quality of what's going on (at Brown) in a number of departments."
