Director’s Message

June 2008

“A University is only as good as its students and faculty; a University is only as good as its students and faculty”, or so I repeated to myself on a warm spring day in 1984 when I accepted the appointment as second Director of the Murphy Institute and immediately began to wonder how I would measure success.

Apart from the resources of the Tulane Murphy Foundation, things did not look promising at the start. The Murphy Institute, established in 1980 under the exclusive control of Tulane’s Department of Economics was more or less in receivership when I, quite improbably, was handed the Director’s reigns at end of only my fifth year on the Tulane faculty. In the fall of 1984, the Murphy Institute had attracted three majors to its undergraduate program in political economy; its first Director had moved elsewhere; and it had no faculty it could call its own.

In an effort to pump life into the undergraduate program, Tulane’s then Provost Fran Lawrence charged me with developing a new curriculum and other program activity in political economy that would have broad interdisciplinary appeal for students and faculty alike. He also re-configured funding by the Tulane Murphy Foundation to allow the Murphy Institute to make joint faculty appointments in Economics, Philosophy, History, and Political Science.

Some twenty four years later, if it’s still true that a university is only as good as its students and faculty, there’s no question Tulane has been extraordinarily well-served by the re-vamped Murphy Institute. And we were quick off the mark. In less than two years, the number of political economy majors grew tenfold, from 3 to 106. Among that number were Christopher T. Brown ‘87, one of Tulane’s first recipients of a Harry S. Truman scholarship, and Lorien Smith, ‘88, the first woman elected President of the Associated Student Body since 1977. Mark Champa ‘88, was elected ASB Vice President.

By spring of 1985, the revamped Murphy Institute also had begun to build an innovative and interdepartmental “core” faculty who year-in and year-out now teach courses specifically designed for our undergraduate program and have helped to develop our diverse program of interdisciplinary seminars, lectures, and conferences. Among the Murphy Institute’s first faculty recruits was Jonathan Riley, appointed in 1985, and today widely recognized as one of Tulane’s most productive and respected scholars. He has been a recipient of major research fellowships from the National Humanities Center and Princeton University’s Center for Human Values, and is founding co-editor of our scholarly journal PPE: A Journal of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

This newsletter exists, in part, to gather annual testimony to the value of the Murphy Institute’s students and faculty. I am proud to say that, during my years as Director, such testimony has never been in scarce supply. But it seemed unusually abundant in 2007-2008. Consider three examples among many:

• The Class of 2008. For many years now, the Murphy Institute has been well-known for the excellence of its undergraduate students. But the concentration of talent we had in this year’s senior class was quite remarkable. Of the twenty four Tulane undergraduates who were awarded B.A. degrees in political economy at the 2008 University Commencement, a full one-third received high academic honors: Lucas Lockhart, Ryan McDonald, and Laura Pavicevic-Johnston graduated summa cum laude; Samantha Demartino, Clarke Edwards, Rebecca Jade Harry, and Emily Hersh, magna cum laude; and Laura Weiss, cum laude with departmental honors. Six of our graduating seniors wrote honors theses. Lucas Lockhart was also inducted into The William Wallace Peery Society, whose select membership includes graduating seniors who have earned the highest cumulative grade point averages during the course of their undergraduate careers. Laura Pavicevic-Johnston and Angela Sealy were charter members of the first class of Tulane Undergraduate Public Service Fellows. Laura Weiss has been offered a position with Teach for America. I could go on.

• Laura Pavicevic-Johnston. Of the many talented students in the Murphy Class of 2008, Ms. Pavicevic-Johnston may be the most remarkable. Just listing the many honors she received during 2007-2008 should suffice to support that claim. In addition to graduating summa cum laude and being selected a charter member of Tulane’s new Public Service Fellows, Ms. Pavicevic-Johnston was also the winner of ( a ) the Oak Wreath (awarded by the Newcomb College Institute to seniors who have distinguished themselves in the pursuit of learning and leadership; ( b ) the Mary B. Scott Memorial Prize, awarded for original research in the fields of history, economics, and political science; ( c ) the Anthony F. and Mary Anne Corasaniti Award, bestowed on a Tulane undergraduate with a demonstrated interest in international affairs; and ( d ) designation as Senior Honors Scholar in Political Economy. Ms. Pavicevic-Johnston also authored an outstanding honors thesis on “Market Refrom, Rising Inequality, and Conflicting Ideologies: Successes and Failures in the Pursuit of an East Asian Model in China and Vietnam.”

• Professor Mary K. Olson. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, Professor Olson (Economics) got off to something of a slow start when she joined the Murphy Insitute core faculty in the fall of 2005. But since then she has built a reputation as one of Tulane’s most respected teachers and scholars. This spring she received the Mortar Board Excellence in Teaching Award, given annually by the Newcomb College Institute and Mortar Board to a tenured Tulane faculty member who has excelled in the classroom and contributed to the growth and development of students. Professor Olson’s also received national recognition when she was asked to serve as a mentor to a select group of junior health economists in a nationwide program sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Center for the Study of Women in the Economics Profession, and the American Economic Association. In this role, she will provide feedback on junior faculty doing research in her field, health economics and policy, and participate in a series of panels that deal with the challenges women face in pursuing careers as economists. The program was created to help improve chances of success and promotion for young women in the economics profession.

On other fronts, I am happy to report that the Murphy Institute’s Center for Ethics continues to prosper as a national and international “think-tank” in ethics and public affairs. The building blocks of its success have been various. But certainly chief among them has been PPE: A Journal of Politics, Philosophy and Economics, which was launched in February, 2002, by founding co-editors Jonathan Riley and and former Murphy Institute core faculty member Gerald Gaus (now James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy, Arizona). Since then, PPE has become the first place many scholars look for new papers at the intersection of the fields of politics, philosophy, and economics; also the first place many think about when considering where they would like new research at this intersection to appear. Now entering its seventh year of publication, PPE has explored issues that have included constitutional design, property rights, the morals of the market, the welfare state, population ethics, and the evolution of norms.

Other Murphy Institute students and faculty achievements (and more details on those mentioned above) are described in the pages that follow. The Center for Ethics annual newsletter, Focus on the Center, provides a more detailed account of its activities. Focus is available in hard copy by request, and on line at www.murphy.tulane.edu/publications/focus.

Richard F. Teichgraeber, Director
June 2008