Border Crossings

I first met Bill Barber in 1975, when I came to interview for a position in economics at Wesleyan University, where Bill had taught for almost twenty years. I’d shown some interest in interdisciplinary work, so my hosts made sure my tour included the College of Social Studies, an unusually intensive undergraduate program that combined three years of close study in economics, government, history, and philosophy with a relentless regime of weekly essays and tutorial meetings. Bill had his office there, across the campus from the other economists, and taught half his courses in the college, which he’d helped to found. It was, my skeptical hosts cordially informed me, modeled on the way philosophy, politics, and economics were taught together at Oxford, and had little to do with "real" economics, the kind they did, with its high theory and, even then, its commitment to econometrics. As I soon learned, the college was the brainchild of a group of tweedy Oxonians with a mission: to teach these subjects together in a way that recognized the essential unity of the social sciences and history and, in the teaching of each, drew insights and context from all the others. This wasn’t how I’d been taught economics, or anything else. I knew nothing about Oxford, and next to nothing about history and philosophy. But in the two hours I spent that day at the College of Social Studies with Bill and his collaborators in the mission, all of them subjects of the same cordial skepticism in their own departments, I became one of them myself.