Using Student Course Evaluations to Design Faculty Development Workshops

Current practice is to administer end-of-course student evaluations and to use the results as part of a faculty member’s annual teaching performance evaluation. Since the administration collects the data it ought to use it to help faculty improve their course evaluation scores. This may seem self-defeating but satisfied students not only rate the professor higher but likely rate the program and the university higher. In this era of external and public rankings of programs, this is important. Factor analysis can help administrators analyze student course evaluations and identify problem areas that can then be the targeted for faculty development programs and workshops

Teaching Environmental Ethics to MBA Students

This essay explains the author\u27s approach to teaching environmental ethics in the graduate school of business. The approach is based on a religious rather than a philosophical perspective, taking its light not from theology or religious studies but from anthropology. The author discusses the origins of the course, then explains the anthropological model of religion as a cultural system and briefly applies that model to economics, focusing on the worldview that undergirds it. The course then shifts to how others understand the world in which they live, introduces Aldo Leopold\u27s A Sand County Almanac, and ends by speculating on what might come next if the course were a third longer than it is

Review of The Livelihood of Man by Karl Polanyi

A review of The Livelihood of Man by Karl Polanyi is presented

Why Teach Environmental Ethics? Because We Already Do

In this paper we argue for the importance of the formal teaching of environmental ethics. This is, we argue, both because environmental ethics is needed to respond to the environmental issues generated by the neoliberal movement in politics and economics, and because a form of environmental ethics is implicit, but unexamined, in that which is currently taught. We maintain that students need to become aware of the latent ethical dimension in what they are taught. To help them, we think that they need to understand how models and metaphors structure and impact their worldviews. We describe how a simple in-class exercise encourages students to experience the way metaphors organize feelings, courses of action, and cognitive understandings. This is then intellectualized by way of Clifford Geertz\u27s concept of culture and his model for the analysis of sacred symbols. From there we present a brief interpretation of modern economics as the embodiment of the dominant modern ethos. This leads into a consideration of ecology as a science, and to the environmental ethic embodied in Aldo Leopold\u27s Land Ethic. We close with a personal experience that highlights how environmental teaching can make students aware of the presence of an implicit, but unexamined, environmental ethic

Review of Political Economy: Past and Present by Lord Robbins

A review of Political Economy: Past and Present by Lord Robbins is presented

Plenary Session on Macromarketing and Politics Roundtable on Macromarketing and Politics

In this conference presentation I draw on C.S. Lewis to make the point that newspapers, films, novels, and textbooks all undermine the macromarketing point of view. Every student in every class in all schools of business sees economics everywhere and by it they see, interpret, and understand everything else. That blocks a macromarketing perspective, a perspective that does not rely on the market and the state as the sole alternatives in the provisioning systems of societies (George Fisk’s widely referenced definition of marketing among the macromarketing community). To fully grasp that one must appreciate that the market is a metaphor

A Hermeneutic Approach to Economics: If Economics is Not Science, And if it is Not Merely Mathematics, Then What Could it Be?

This contribution to Economics as Discourse: An Analysis of the Language of Economists develops the theme that economics, long considered a science, is actually part of the cultural context by and through which we give meaning and purpose to our lives. Economics is culture, our culture in the sense that it represents an “effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existentialist situations that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives” (Bell 1976, p. 12). The analytical framework for this chapter is Clifford Geertz’s model of religion as a cultural system (1973, pp. 87-125). The analytical task is to delve into the meaning of economics. I juxtapose economics with religion knowing full well that few economists think of themselves as theologians. Doing so, however, illuminates the meanings of the concepts embodied in the symbols that make up economics proper, symbols such as the Marshallian Cross.1 We can then inquire into the relationship, or lack of relationship, between economics and what goes on in the world