Professor Marjorie McElroy served as chair of the Department of Economics from 1995 until 2002. She sat down with the staff of the Śconophile in March 2003 and offered these reflections.
Marjorie McElroy |
Śconophile: Margie, first, we want to thank you for your leadership and support as chair. Seven years--one as interim plus two regular three-year terms--is an unusuallylong term of office. We're delighted to be interviewing you here. What was the most fun about being chair?
Probably the feeling that we [the department] were all working together on doing something really important. Of the 31 faculty listed on our homepage, I've had a hand in appointing 17. |
How did that come about?
In the first half of the 1990s we had lost a net of 10 economics faculty. The reasons for the losses were idiosyncratic--name a reason; someone had left for that reason. When I became interim chair in 1995, we were at a historic low of 20 faculty. At the same time, our majors had just hit 475--with no end in sight (they doubled over the next six years).
What are you most proud of from your time as chair?
Building a base for faculty development and getting the department the needed resources to do that. I think our whole faculty chose to see this as a tremendous opportunity to significantly improve all aspects of our department. We knew we were changing our faculty base and our future prospects. There was a feeling of working together to do something special against steep odds. I'm truly proud of being part of the way people pitched in and worked together, and of the outcome. In going from 20 faculty to 31, we increased the number of assistant professors from 3 to 12. Most importantly, we went from having only 3 mid-career scholars to 5. That may seem a small change. But, this group is critical to the whole health of the department. Competition for top scholars in this group is fierce. These faculty will provide the next generation of leadership for economics at Duke--indeed, they already are.
There were lots of disappointments along the way. Making an offer is not the same as landing a new faculty member. But much worse than that is losing a valued colleague to a competing department. Nothing is worse--you have a vested interest in their careers, you've done their tenure cases, and really grown fond of them to boot. In my seven years, we lost faculty at every level--12 in all. So, if we track the numbers, we actually had to appoint 23 new faculty to make our net gain of 11. Retention of great faculty is the perennial struggle of every chair.
We needed to develop a new generation of leadership before we all got too old to do it. I think we did it by the skin of our teeth.
Does there have to be so much turnover?
I wish I knew. All good departments experience it-save maybe the very top handful. Competition is fierce. Competing schools can be much faster at actually getting out an offer than we; their offers are remarkably generous. Spousal placement is a huge issue. These days, professors come with professional spouses. Hence, hiring/retaining one professor really entails two jobs. It's especially painful to lose colleagues who really want to stay in the department. But, a couple simply cannot pass up a long-sought solution to their joint location problem. There's no system. Sometimes I felt more like a spousal placement officer than a chair.
What effect has the turnover had on the department?
I would never minimize the individual losses. But, on the whole, we have come out ahead in many respects. Most importantly, we forged a department consensus that has only strengthened over the last seven years. In 1995 the Kreps report [external review] doubted our ability to work together--in both hiring and planning. I think we are now way beyond that. We have a shared consensus on what we want to do well (and for cost reasons, what we will not do). Like most programs, our consensus emphasizes the core (micro, macro, and econometrics) and standard fields (industrial organization, international trade, labor, public, etc.). We are distinct in emphasizing their overlaps and the microeconomic foundations. This view sees economics as one discipline as opposed to a collection of separate fields. It maximizes synergies. For example, we search not for a labor economist, but for an applied microeconomist whose work is of broad interest to theorists or econometricians. Conversely in the core we hired theorists and econometricians whose work includes substantive, problem-driven applications. Finally, our consensus also recognizes the many special things we already have at Duke: history of political economy, the critical role of our amazing symbiosis with colleagues at Fuqua, Public Policy, UNC, NCSU, the health community in the Triangle, and so on.
Any other things that developed over this interval?
Many. My colleagues have brought all sorts of good things to Duke including important international and national conferences. They and their students garnered many honors. In the graduate program, our eight standing workshop series as well as our graduate lunch groups provide excellent and essential training, integral to a strong graduate program. We enjoy outstanding computer support and an unusually talented support staff. In these and many other cases, there are many names to applaud and to thank--faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates. Let me single out just one.
Within a year of his arrival, Tom Nechyba shepherded through the reform of our undergraduate major and was the brains behind establishing the EcoTeach Center. The reform enabled us not just to maintain but to improve the quality of our excellent major. Majors (nearly one thousand of them) go there for help-with running probit regressions for an independent study, with satisfying the nitty gritty of Curriculum 2000, with sponsoring a student research conference. The Center works for them and thereby for all of us, faculty, staff, and graduate students. It is very satisfying to send students there. My role was to hire Tom, lobby for the Center's space, and to keep out of the way.
Suppose you had all the resources in the world to spend on the economics department. What would you do next?
Well, that's a big one. A new building and endowments for the following would do!
One, I think our assistant professor positions are reasonably competitive, except that the assistant professors really should have more time do their own research. Getting tenure is much harder than it used to be. The research time needs to come early in their careers. So how about--you said all the resources in the world--five new named assistant professorships that include provision for a semester of pure research time in their second or third year at Duke?
Then there are the workshops and lunches. An endowment pot for these would enable us to have some longer-term distinguished visitors for a week or two at a time plus, for example, a distinguished senior visiting faculty for a semester each year.
I would endow several more graduate fellowships, and in particular, the latest one--the Dudley Wallace Fund. These endowments are critical to competing for the best graduate students.
Most importantly, we need endowed chairs for distinguished senior faculty. It's hard to overstate the possible effects. We were lucky to have one, the [Juanita and Clifton] Kreps Chair. Imagine the impact of five "Tim Bollerslev's"!
Finally, I would endow the operating costs of the Triangle Census Research Data Center. As you know, this Center-under strict rules to protect confidentiality--brings data to the research community. These data are normally unavailable. Hence, the Center provides unprecedented research opportunities for graduate students and faculty alike. We are extremely lucky to have one of only seven such centers, nationwide, right here in our department. The NSF and the U.S. Bureau of the Census sponsor our Center, but by no means can they foot the entire bill. Securing the financial security of the Center would, no doubt, be a boon to our graduate program, to economics, to all of the social sciences at Duke, and to the entire Triangle social-science research community.
Now that you have served the community so well, what do you enjoy most about not being chair?
I've finally relaxed and am getting back to teaching and my research. My undergraduates in 208, "The Economics of the Family" seminar, have been great. Before my term as chair I had "too many" graduate students. Now I am actually looking for a graduate student or two to write with me. From time to time I contemplate finally organizing my office. But most of all, when someone says we should do something about X, I can punt it right to our able chair, Craufurd Goodwin, and heave a sigh of relief.
Now that you have a chance to get back into research, what ideas are you working on?
I am beginning a major project on an old topic for me--household decision making. There are three major models of household behavior. One of the three is cooperative (e.g., Nash-bargained household decisions). While my work here with Jeannie Horney goes back to the origins of the literature, I have not done much recently. So for now I am catching up on reading and getting into an empirical project. The objective is to use households in which wives earn more than husbands (now upwards of 25%) to tease apart the roles of efficiency and bargaining. How different from other households are purchases, and how differently is labor supplied, in households where wives earn more than husbands? What happens when, for example, models of efficiency are tested in terms of high and low earner rather than in terms of husband and wife as earners? I hope to tell you in about a year.
Thanks for talking with us.
Thank you! It's been fun.
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