1. U of L Retired Academic Staff Association (ULRASA)
  2. Department of Economics History

Department of Economics History

 

A PARTIAL HISTORY OF

THE ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE

1960 through 2008

by Jeremiah Allen

Emeritus Professor

March 2013

 

Fredrick Albert Rudd

First Economics Faculty Member

in Lethbridge

photograph from the 1960/61

Lethbridge Junior College calendar

 

  

Abraham Flexner, founding director of the Institute of Advanced Study, once wrote "Institutes like nations are perhaps happiest if they have no history."  I hope this history causes no unhappiness.

 

Preface, Excuses, and Thanks

I was a faculty member in the Economics Department at the University of Lethbridge from July 1, 1972, until I retired on July 1, 2008.  This history is "partial" in two ways.  First, it is "partial" in the sense of being incomplete: it begins in 1960, which is the year of the first Lethbridge Junior College calendar in the University of Lethbridge Archive (although the College opened in 1957), and ends when I retired from the University in 2008.  Second, it is "partial" in the sense of being my view of what happened, the view I am "partial" to.  It should not, therefore, be considered entirely factual.  Much of what I write here is based on my memory.  Where possible I've filled in, or checked my memory, with sources from the University Archive.  I had a useful conversation with Owen Holmes,  received extremely helpful comments from Duane Rockerbie and Allan Walburger, and helpful comments from Christopher Cook, Richard Mueller, Kurt Klein, and Danny Leroy: Thanks guys.  Any errors are, of course, mine

I have chosen not to include individuals who were in the Department for only a single year or, with two exceptions, who were sessional lecturers.  None of these did research while in the department, and only those two had any real impact on the Department.

At times I add my own "*Editorial Comments"; these are inside asterisks*

I use the following conventions:

  • "The College" is Lethbridge Junior College; "the University" is the University of Lethbridge;  "the Faculty" is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University; and "the Department" is the Economics Department in the Faculty.
  • The word "course" means a single semester course unless noted otherwise.
  • I capitalize only formal names of courses.
  • The first semester courses in micro- and macro-economic theory have had a variety of names, including "Introductory", "Introduction to ..." and "Principles of ...".  I'll call them all "Principles".
  • Hiring, promotions, resignations, and retirements are dated as of the year they became effective.
  • I use only the first year of an academic year, so 1967/68, for example, is just “1967”.
  • I put individuals' degrees in parentheses after their names, with a dash between the degree and the university from which it was earned. A PhD is in Economics unless otherwise noted.
  • AbD means "All but Dissertation", ie all the requirements for a PhD except the dissertation
  • I don't use middle names or initials.
  • After the first mention of Ignace Adel-Czlowiekowski, I refer to him just as "Adel".

The first section is a "pre-history", the time before there was a University or a Department: 1960 to 1967.  The second section is a history of the Faculty members in the Department from 1967 through 2008.  This is split into four periods: A. The formative years from 1967 to 1972.   This part includes three “character sketches”, one each of the three  "characters" who were the founding members of the Department. B. A period of nearly complete change of faculty from 1972 to 1982. C. A period of stability from 1982 to 1993. D. A period of constant turnover from 1993 to 2008.    The third section is a history of the Program of the Department: 1967-2008.

These are followed by two of what I call "side-shows": one of the Department's relation with Business/Management; the other of its relation with Agricultural Studies.  And last I add two  "digressions": one of the Department's experiment with a pre-principles course; the other a personal journey through state of computing during my career. 

I. Pre-History: 1957 to 1967

From 1957 through 1966 there was no University of Lethbridge.  There was the Lethbridge Junior College, which opened in 1957, initially offering first-year university-level courses.  From 1957 to 1965 the College offered one economics course: Principles of Economics at the 200 level.  The College had no economics department during these years; it just had one faculty member who taught three full-year courses: Principles of Economics, an accounting course, and a general business course, all at the 200-level.  From 1960 to 1963 this faculty member was Frederick Albert Rudd, (BA,LLB,MA-Alberta).  From 1963 to 1965 this faculty member was Harold Ricker (BComm,MA-Alberta).

In 1965, the College expanded to offer second-year university-level courses, and a quasi-department of economics began.  The program was expanded by adding full-year Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Economic Theory courses, both at the 300-level.  Two accounting courses were also added.  In 1966 another 300-level full-year economics course was added: Money and Banking.

Two economists were hired into the quasi-department in 1965 to teach these courses, replacing Ricker.  They were Bahir Bilgin, Lecturer, (BAdmSci-Middle East Technical University, MA-Minnesota), and Young Cheung, Assistant Professor, (BA,MA-Western Reserve).

II. The Faculty

A. Formative (and Turbulent) Years: 1967 to 1972

In 1967 the University of Lethbridge was created, and the College was divided into the University and Lethbridge Community College.  The University created the Faculty which created the Department.  Many faculty members moved from the College to the University, including Bilgin and Cheung.  The Department expanded course offerings, adding enough that a major in Economics could be offered, and it added faculty members.  Herbert Axford (BComm-Manitoba, MComm-Toronto, PhD[Business]-Wisconsin), was hired in 1967 as Professor and Chair of the Department.  One year later Ignace Adel-Czlowiekowski (MLaw-Luov, PhD[Administrative Law]-Fribourg) was added to the Department as Associate Professor.  One year after that Cheung left, and Takashi Ohki (BA-Tokyo, MA,AbD-UBC) and Johan Schuyff (EconDoctorandus-Amsterdam) were both added as Assistant Professors.  An "EconDoctorandus" was not a PhD.

Many of the faculty members brought from the College did not have PhDs.  To improve the credentials of its faculty, the University adopted two policies.  One of these policies was to offer paid leaves to any of the “College faculty" who would use them to upgrade their credentials, ie to get a PhD.  Bilgin was one who did so.  He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1967 and given a paid leave of absence in 1968.  He returned to the University in 1970 with a PhD from Durham University.

1969 was the big year of hiring for the University.  The academic job market in Canada at that time was a seller's market, so the University was forced in many instances to hire faculty who were AbD.  The second policy the University used to improve the credentials of its faculty was to give these AbDs contracts that specified that they could not get tenure without finishing their PhDs.  Ohki was one of these AbDs.

The Department at the University began with three members in 1967 – Axford, Bilgin, and Cheung – then grew to four in 1968 – Adel, Axford, Bilgin, and Cheung - and five from 1969 to 1972 – Adel, Axford, Bilgin, Ohki, and Schuyff.  Schuyff resigned suddenly at the end of August, 1971, to attend graduate school at Simon Fraser University.  He was replaced by Donald Mercer on a short-term contract until the end of June, 1972.

The Department's faculty, their rank, and their fields as of June 30, 1972:

  • Bilgin, Assistant: Business and Development, Chair
  • Adel, Associate: Labour
  • Axford, Professor: Public Finance
  • Ohki, Assistant: Micro-Theory, Math Econ, and Econometrics

I infer that these five years were turbulent from five things I know.  1: of the four faculty in the Department on June 30, 1971, only one was in the Department on June 30, 1966.  2: the curriculum was constantly being changed:, courses added, courses dropped, and courses re-numbered.  3: Axford was hired in 1967 as Chair, but in 1970 he was replaced by Adel.  Sometime in Spring of 1972, in the middle of the semester, Adel was replaced as Chair by Bilgin.  4: both Cheung and Schuyff left the department, Cheung in 1969 and Schuyff in August 1971.  Cheung did not have a PhD, and possibly his contract was not renewed because of that.  Schuyff left just as the academic year began because he was told he could not get tenure without a PhD.  Mercer was hired on a short-term contract for at least part of that year, but Schuyff's sudden departure had to have caused difficulties.  5: both Adel and Axford were here during my first three years in the Department, and there was strong and open animosity between the two.

Despite that animosity, after I arrived in 1972, with Bilgin as Chair, things were reasonably calm in the Department and remained so for many years despite the high turnover of faculty.

---------------------------------------------

*Editorial Comment: Economists know, from experience, that economics is rarely understood well by “outsiders”.  This was especially true during the early hiring at the University, when the two deans of the Faculty were both outsiders: Owen Holmes, Chemistry, and Jim Cousins, History.  When I arrived in July, 1972, I was the first coursework economics PhD to be in the department.  Ohki was still AbD, and would remain so until he lost the job.  Axford's PhD was in Business.  Adel's was in Administrative Law.  Bilgin's PhD was awarded for just writing a dissertation; he did no coursework in economics for that degree.  The Department began, and spent its first five years, with faculty members, and a University administration, that had little understanding of, or appreciation for, economics*

The Department had three "characters" during this period.  Here are brief sketches:

Ignace Adel

Adel was famous (notorious?) around the university for the fact that in winter he would walk to the university.  The Whoop-up Drive bridge had not yet been built, and the University was the only building on the west side of the river.  So Adel had to walk down and across the frozen Oldman River, then up to the main building.  This was obviously dangerous, but Adel did it routinely, seemingly unconcerned about the possibility that the ice on the river might give way.

The mid- to late seventies were the first years in history that the OECD economies experienced what was called "stagflation".  The “...flation” part was the double digit inflation experienced in those countries during those years; the "stag..." part was the relatively high levels of unemployment – “stagnation” – in those countries during those years.  One "theory" that was revived at the time was that of "Kondratiev waves", or cycles.  Kondratiev was a Russian economist who noted, in 1925, what he believed was a fifty-year cycle, with ten year long depressions as the troughs.  Thus the 1930s, following the 1890s, then, with the idea revived, the 1970s.  (Those promoting this notion seemed to have a little trouble with arithmetic.  As you can see, this is a forty year cycle, not fifty.  And note that forty years after the 1970s we have the 2010s, which have been and will continue to be another ten year trough. Hmm.)

Adel was a believer in Kondratiev.  He brought an acquaintance of his down from the University of Calgary to give a seminar on the subject.  This guy was really something.  He started with the fifty-year cycle (sic), then messed around with numbers until, voila, he got one final number, derived from all the others.  With a flourish, he announced that this final number was Plank's constant.  "Could this be a coincidence?  No!"  Which proved his theory!  Great fun.

Herb Axford

Many people have heard the following story, but it's worth retelling for its glimpse into Axford as a character.  When I was here for my interview, after the University had made an offer and I had accepted, Axford invited me to his house for dinner.  As the newest member of the department, I felt I could hardly refuse, so Axford drove me to his house in the late afternoon.

There Axford showed me his newest hobby - he was making a bansai garden.  The previous fall he had gone to the mountains and pulled up about two hundred pine, fir, and spruce seedlings - each 20 to 25cm high - and put them small pots.  The pots were about 20cm in diameter, and about 25cm deep.  When I saw them in late May, the pots were arranged in rows, roughly ten high and twenty wide, in a sunny corner of Axford's back yard.  They had been there all winter, above ground.  Of course they were all quite dead, all their roots had frozen.

Bahir Bilgin

Bilgin was a study in contradictions.  He was slender and handsome, and dressed beautifully.  I especially remember (and coveted) a suede suit he liked to wear.  When I arrived in 1972, he was driving a Jaguar XKE.  He looked like a world-class playboy.  But at heart he was a family man. He had three children, including twins, and was getting divorced as I arrived.  The divorce was hurting him hugely.

Bilgin took a study leave in 1979, followed by a one year unpaid leave.  When he returned he bowed out of any university activity but teaching, at which he continued to excel.  He was famous during this period for having his office filled with large potted plants.  And I do mean “filled”, one could barely walk into the office for the plants.  He had two humidifiers going at all times to keep the plants healthy.  His office became known, for good reason, as “the jungle”.

Nevertheless, he had been a fine Chair of the Department, managing to nearly eliminate, or at least bury, all the animosity that had prevailed.  All the hiring done when he was Chair was of economists with PhDs from good coursework programs: Allen, Ebel, Clarke, and Dick, and one of those, Dick, was a superstar.  With Bilgin as Chair, the Department became a modern economics department and a good place to work.

In addition to his chairing the Department as it became a modern department, in spring 1975 Bilgin made what was certainly the most brilliant and productive decision of his career: he hired Merle Christie as the Department secretary.  Everyone who has ever been in the Department, and everyone who has ever dealt with the Department, was, and remains, eternally grateful.

*Editorial Comment – A short digression on Merle:  With my having been gone for more than six years, Merle is now the longest serving member of the Department.  Merle may also be the secretary who has served a single department for the longest time.  (Possible exception, Doris Kostiuk?)   In the  "old days" of typewriters, Merle's skill was unsurpassed, and her ability to read our, often horrible, handwriting, and figure out documents with portions underlined and circled, and with arrows everywhere, was uncanny.  Clarke called her “Merle the magician”, and he was right.  When word processors were introduced, she was among the first of the secretaries to master each of the three that came along: Scribe (which those of us who were around remember with a distinct lack of affection), Wordperfect, and Word.  She has been always cheerful and friendly, and over the years she has been so pleasant, and such an important resource, to our students that I'm sure many remember her more fondly than they do any of their professors.*

B. The Making of a Real Department: 1972 to 1982

In 1972 I, Jeremiah Allen (BA,PhD-Colorado), was hired as Assistant Professor to replace Schuyff, and to teach macro courses.  I was the first, and for two years the only, PhD in the Department with a coursework degree.  Ohki failed to finish his PhD, his contract expired, and he left in 1974. He was replaced by Bernd Ebel (BA-Hamburg, PhD-Alberta), who was hired as Assistant Professor.  Ebel's presence allowed the Department to add three field courses: Regional and Urban Economics, Natural Resource Economics, and Environmental Economics.

In 1975 the Department was given an expansion position and hired (Stephen) Glenn Clarke (BA,MA,PhD-Queens) as Assistant Professor.  This allowed the Department to add Industrial Organization as a field.  Clarke was promoted to Associate Professor a year later.

Axford retired suddenly at the end of the spring semester, 1975.  Allen took over the Public Sector Economics field.  Trevor Dick (BA-Carleton, MA-Toronto, PhD-Washington) was hired in 1976 as Assistant Professor to replace Axford.  Dick's presence allowed the Department to add two fields: Canadian Economic History and International Finance.

In 1978 Kurt Klein (BA,MA-Saskatchewan, PhD-Purdue), an agricultural economist working at the Lethbridge Agricultural Research Station, was hired as a sessional lecturer to teach a course in Agricultural Economics.  In 1981 the Department was given an expansion position.  The Department wanted to keep Agricultural Economics as a field and was also scheduled to begin offering its own Statistics course in 1982.  Klein was hired as Assistant Professor in 1981 to teach these.

In 1979 Bilgin took a leave, followed by a one-year extension of that leave.  Christopher Cook (BA-Loyola, MA,PhD-Concordia) was hired on two consecutive one-year contracts to replace him.  In 1981 Adel retired.  The Department decided to add International Trade as a field and hired Cook as Assistant Professor to replace Adel, to teach Trade and Economic Development.

Bilgin was promoted to Associate as of 1974; Clarke was promoted to Associate as of 1976; Allen was promoted to Associate as of 1977; Dick and Ebel were promoted to Associate as of 1978.

Bilgin remained as Chair until 1976; Clarke was Chair from 1976 to1982.

The Department's faculty, their rank, and their fields as of June 30, 1982:

  • Clarke, Associate: Industrial Organization, Chair
  • Allen, Associate: Macro-Theory, Labour, and Public Sector
  • Bilgin, Associate: Business, and Economic Development
  • Cook, Assistant: Mathematical Economics, Development, and International Trade
  • Dick, Associate: Economic History, and International Finance
  • Ebel, Associate: Micro-Theory, Regional, Resources, and Environmental
  • Klein, Assistant:: Agriculture, Statistics, and Micro-Theory

By 1981 the Department had seven faculty members, and six had Economics PhDs from good coursework programs.  The five years from 1972 through 1976 especially had radically changed the Department.  It was now a true, second-half of the twentieth century, Economics Department.

C. Modest Expansion and Stability: 1982 to 1993

In 1984, the Department was given an expansion position.  It wanted a monetary economist (partly to please Management) and hired William Gibson (BA,MA,PhD-Simon Fraser) as Assistant Professor.  Bilgin was given an unpaid leave in 1985, and as early as 1988 it was clear that he would never return.  The Department was allowed to hire Bilgin's replacement in 1989.  At that time Klein had taken over Intermediate Micro-Theory and was teaching the two Agricultural Economics courses, so the Department also needed someone to teach Statistics.  In 1989 it hired Duane Rockerbie (BA,MA,PhD-Simon Fraser), who was also a monetary economist, as Assistant Professor to do so.

In 1991 the Department finally added what at the University are called "labs"- at most universities these are called "tutorials" - to the  two introductory courses and to the Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Theory courses.  At its beginning, the University, with no graduate programs, had created positions called Academic Assistants to do the work - the teaching of "labs" - that is done by graduate students at most other universities.  So in 1991 the Department hired an Academic Assistant, Donna Tibbett, later Donna Townley, (BA,MA-Saskatchewan) to teach these "labs".

Klein was promoted to Associate as of 1983, and to Professor of Agricultural Economics as of 1989; Cook was promoted to Associate as of 1989; Dick to Professor as of 1990.

Clarke was Chair from 1982 to 1983; Allen was Chair from 1983 to 1992; Cook was Chair from 1992 to 1995.  In 1985 Allen was on study leave, and Klein was Acting Chair.

The Department's faculty, their rank, and their fields as of June 30, 1993:

  • Cook, Associate: Mathematical Economics, Development, and Trade, Chair
  • Allen, Associate: Macro-Theory, Labour, and Applied Micro-Theory
  • Clarke, Associate: Industrial Organization
  • Dick, Professor: Economic History and International Finance
  • Ebel, Associate: Micro-Theory, Regional, and Environmental
  • Gibson, Assistant: Monetary
  • Klein,  Professor: Agriculture, Statistics, and Micro-Theory
  • Rockerbie, Assistant: Statistics, Monetary, and (later) Sports Economics
  • Tibbett, Academic Assistant

In a real sense, this was the Department at its height.  There were eight faculty members teaching full time, all with PhDs from good coursework programs, each specializing in a different field.  Over the next decade and a half the Department would first shrink, to six faculty members, then grow.  But never again would there be eight PhDs, each specializing in different fields, teaching full time.

 

 

D. Cuts; Revolving Door; Agriculturalization: 1993 through 2008

In 1993 stability came to a crashing halt.    Over the next sixteen  years changes occurred every year.  So I now change my approach to this history and just list changes in the Department's faculty by year from 1993 through 2008.

1993: Clarke retired.  (Five and a half years later Clarke died suddenly of heart failure.)  His field, Industrial Organization, would not be covered again until 2003.

Rockerbie was promoted to Associate.

1994: Gibson went on sick leave, then Long Term Disability in Spring Semester, 1995.

1995: Allen replaced Cook as Chair.

1996: Benoit Delage (BA-Laval, MA-Queens, AbD-UBC) was hired as Assistant Professor to cover Public Sector Economics.  This had been Allen's field when Axford left, but he had shifted to

Labour Economics when Adel retired - Labour had always been his field of research - so it had not been offered since 1981.  Delage was hired on a two-year term contract because he was AbD.

The University added an Agricultural Studies program.  A person was needed to teach the Agricultural Economics courses added for the program.  Allan Walburger (BA-Lethbridge, PhD-Purdue), who had been working for Klein as a research associate, was hired as an Assistant Professor to fill this role.  (See the second "side-show" below for details.)

Gibson resigned in January, 1997.

1997: The increased number of students in the introductory courses meant an expansion of labs, and Agricultural Studies needed an Academic Assistant.  Jeff Davidson (BA-Lethbridge, MA-Guelph) was hired to do these.

1998: Delage finished his PhD, but because he had been hired on a term contract, the Department was required to search for a person to fill the position.  It did, and hired Peter Ibbott (BA-Queens, MA,PhD-Toronto) as Assistant Professor to cover Public Sector Economics.  Delage  left.

The Agricultural Studies program had expanded, and, with both Klein and Walburger eligible for study leaves in the near future, the Department was given another position in Agricultural Economics.  Dan LeRoy (BA-Carleton, MA,PhD-Guelph) was hired as an Assistant Professor to fill this position.

Ebel replaced Allen as Chair.

1999: Ebel was diagnosed with terminal cancer in early December, and was given a sick leave as of the Spring Semester.  He never returned to the Department and died in October, 2000.  Allen was Acting Chair during Spring Semester 2000.

*Editorial Comment: The Dean of the Faculty, Bhagwan Dua, acted with great compassion toward Ebel.  Technically a sick leave should last only ninety days, then the faculty member either returns to the University, or takes Long Term Disability.  But going on LTD means both a substantial loss of income and the loss of the University's insurance coverages.  So Dua kept Ebel as a member of the Department on study leave until his death.  That meant that there was no reduction in Ebel's income, that Ebel was covered by the University's supplementary medical insurance until his death, and  that Ebel's widow collected from the University's group life insurance plan when he died.  Kudos to Dua!*

2000: Dick "was retired" on July 1, having turned 65 the year before.  (He died six months later, very suddenly.)  International Finance would not be taught in the Department until 2007.

         Richard Mueller (BA,MA-Calgary, PhD-Texas, Austin) was hired as Associate Professor to replace Dick.  While he was capable of teaching Economic History, and still does so, Mueller's main research field is Labour Economics.

Christopher Nicol (BA-Stirling Scotland, MA,PhD-Queens), an economist, was hired as Dean of the Faculty.  Since deans have to have an academic appointment, Nicol was hired as Professor in the Department.  But Nicol has never taught a course nor been involved in Department affairs, so, from the point of view of the Department, Nicol was, and remains, "inactive".

         Rockerbie became Chair.          

*Editorial Comment:  Trevor Dick was our superstar, the only one we've ever had, and probably the only one we will ever have.  For his promotion, he presented letters from, among others, Dale Jorgenson (recent Nobel winner), Donald (as he was then, now Dierdre) McCloskey (exceptionally well-known and influential economist), and the editor of the Journal of Economic History (published at Cambridge, the top ranked journal in the field).  All said the same thing: Trevor's work had changed everyone's understanding of Canadian economic history at a fundamental level.  Trevor was also one of the first of the new breed of cliometricians; he help found, and was a leading member of the Cliometrics Society his entire career.

*The year Trevor was promoted he published a book, jointly with John Floyd of the University of Toronto, which presented - with a lot of historical evidence, all assembled and analyzed by Trevor - a new theory of exchange rates.  This theory is now standard in intermediate- and graduate-level macro textbooks.

*During Trevor's final year in the Department, Peter Ibbott and I began work on a small event to honour Trevor, and to highlight his contributions to economic history, upon his retirement.  We asked two Nobel Prize winners to come: Douglass North and Robert Fogel.  North wanted to come, but was already booked solid - Peter and I had waited too long.  Fogel said, "Yes, I'd love to come, when?"  We told him; he said he'd be here.  Then, a few days later, Peter got a phone call from Fogel's secretary saying, sorry, Dr Fogel was far too frail to fly to Lethbridge.  Nevertheless, both very much wanted to come, and the esteem with which they held Trevor was palpable.*

2001: Ibbott resigned.  Public Sector Economics would be taught in the Department only twice again, and never by an Economics PhD.

2002: Sylvie Marceau (BSc-Dalhousie, MA-Laval, PhD-California, Berkeley) was hired as an Assistant Professor to replace Ebel - ie to teach Environmental Economics.

          Walburger was promoted to Associate Professor.

Rockerbie was on study leave, Allen was Acting Chair.

2003: David Krause (BA,MA,AbD-Calgary) was hired as Assistant Professor to teach Industrial Organization.  Krause completed his PhD during the year.

Anticipating Cook "being retired" in 2004, Stavroula Malla (BA-Makedonia, PhD-Saskatchewan) was hired as Assistant Professor to replace him.

2004: Cook "was retired".  International Trade was taught only once until 2009.

Krause resigned

Marceau resigned.

Kien Tran (BA-Saskatchewan, MA-Rochester, PhD-Western Ontario) was hired as Associate Professor.  He is an applied statistician and econometrician.

2005: Joshua Anyangah (BA-Kenya, MA-Botswana, PhD-Alberta) was hired to replace Marceau to teach Environmental Economics.

Henning Bjornlund (Bbus, PhD[Business]-South Australia) was hired as Associate Professor in the Department, and Canada Research Chair in Water Resources.  Bjornlund is not an economist and didn't teach in the Department until after 2008.  From the point of view of the Department, Bjornlund was "inactive" through 2008.

2006: Walburger resigned.

Alexander Darku (BA,MPhil-Kenya, PhD-McGill) was hired as Assistant Professor to teach Monetary Economics, which became "Financial Economics, and International Finance".

Kien Tran replaced Rockerbie as Chair.

2007: Changes to the contracts of the Academic Assistants had them now teaching courses on their own, which reduced their time available to handle labs.  This led to a need for another Academic Assistant, and Michael Lanyi (BA-York, MA-Simon Fraser) was hired as an Academic Assistant.

Malla was promoted to Associate Professor.

Allen was promoted to Professor effective June 1, 2008.

2008: Allen retired.

Darku took over Macro-Economic Theory.

Pascal Ghazalian (BS-Lebanon, MS-Greece, PhD-Saskatchewan) was hired as Assistant Professor.  Ghazalian could teach International Trade, so it was brought back as a field offering in the Department.

LeRoy was promoted to Associate Professor.

The Department's faculty, their rank, and their fields as of July 1, 2008:

  • Tran, Associate: Statistics, Econometrics, and Mathematical Economics, Chair
  • Anyangah, Assistant: Environmental
  • Darku, Assistant: Finance and Macro-Theory
  • Ghazalian, Assistant: Agriculture and International Trade
  • Klein,  Professor: Agriculture and Micro-Theory
  • LeRoy, Assistant: Agriculture
  • Malla, Assistant: Agriculture
  • Mueller, Associate: Labour, Econometrics, and Economic History
  • Rockerbie, Associate: Monetary Economics, Forecasting, and Sports Economics
  • Davidson, Academic Assistant
  • Lanyi, Academic Assistant
  • Townley, Academic Assistant
  • Bjornlund, Associate: inactive
  • Nicol, Professor: inactive

As of July 1, 2008, full time teaching faculty members numbered nine, as opposed to eight at the beginning of this period.  But four of those nine specialize in Agricultural Economics, so the Department now had only six specializations.  This was a significant change from 1993.

III.  The Program

A. Curriculum

During the quasi-department's final year at the College, it offered full year courses in: Principles at the 200 level, Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Theory, and Money and Banking, all at the 300 level.  In the first year as the University, courses were not yet semesterized.  Five full year courses were added that year, all at the 300 level: Mathematical Economics; International Trade and Finance; International Macroeconomics; Growth and Development; and Public Finance.

The new University introduced several curriculum requirements which began in 1968.  One was that all courses were semester-long; there could be no full year courses. The other was that each department must offer one, and only one, introductory course, at the 1000-level.  All other courses were to be at the 2000-level or higher.  With semesterization and that requirement, substantial changes were made by the Department in 1968.

Most importantly, Principles of Macro became the introductory course, Economics 1000; Principles of Micro remained the 2000-level; and Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Theory became two courses each, all four at the 2000-level.

The sequence of Principles requires some explanation.  The teaching of economics changed radically as the second half of the twentieth century began.  There were two major forces driving this change, each interacting with the other.  One was the slow but steady shift from the study of economic institutions to the study of economic theory as it was being developed.  The other was the publication of Paul Samuelson's Principles of Economics.  That textbook was a single book.  The splitting of Principles texts into micro and macro wouldn't occur until the mid-1970s.   Samuelson put macro first, and all Principles texts that followed, until the late 1970s, were single books with macro first.  So most universities taught macro first.

For the next four years the Department tinkered constantly with its curriculum, adding courses as it added faculty, dropping courses for one reason or another, and playing with course numbering.  A convention which the Department eventually reached was that the first digit of an "_000-level" course should reflect the year that students would normally be expected to take the course.

By 1972 the Department was offering: multiple sections of the 2 Principles courses; 2 Intermediate Micro- and 2 Intermediate Macro-Theory courses; 4 field courses at the 2000-level; 5 field courses at the 3000-level; and 8 field courses at the 4000-level - the latter including two Mathematical Economics courses and Econometrics.  The course offerings were up to date – equivalent to those of most small North American economics departments - and the course numbering was fairly sensible.  But while this looked good on paper, almost none of the field courses were being taught by a faculty member with any real expertise in the field.  Many of these were dropped relatively quickly.

In 1976 the Department was allowed to have two 1000-level courses.  Principles of Macro was still Economics 1000, but Principles of Micro became Economics 1050.  Other changes to the curriculum in these five years were minor, mainly adding courses – in Industrial Organization, Regional Economics, Natural Resource Economics, Environmental Economics, Economic History, and International Finance – for the new faculty members to teach, and dropping courses that no faculty member had the expertise to teach.  The latter included Mathematical Economics and Econometrics, dropped in 1974, but added again in 1981 because Cook could teach them.  Also in 1981 two courses in Agricultural Economics became permanent; one at the 3000-level, one at the 4000-level.  These would lay the foundations of what in 1996 became the Agricultural Studies program at the University.  At this stage in the Department, all field courses were being taught by faculty members with expertise in the field.

With a couple of exceptions, changes from 1982 to 1993 were just tinkering.  The exceptions were: 1) In 1982 the University forced the Department back to having only one 1000-level course.  We chose that to be Principles of Micro which became Economics 1000.  For the first time the Department had, and required, micro first.  The old Economics 1000 became Economics 2000, Principles of Macro. 2 ) Also in 1982, a 2000-level course in Statistics was added, Economics 2900.  In its first year, its pre-requisites were only Principals of Micro and Macro, but one year later Statistics 1770  became a pre-requisite.  The course was important for two reasons: it allowed us to teach the kind of statistics that we wanted economics students to know; and it became the statistics course of choice for most pre-Management students.  3) In 1988 the Department added a true introductory course, Economics 1001, a pre-principles course.  See the first "side-show" at end of this history for details.  The old Econ 1000 became Econ 2050, and the intermediate theory courses became, respectively, Econ 3050 and 4050 (micro), and Econ 3850 and 4850 (macro).  As they remain.

There was a lot of change in the curriculum after 1993, too much to detail here.  Some changes were driven by faculty turnover and the concurring loss of specialization fields.  Courses and fields dropped include Economics of the Family, Regional Economics, Competition and Strategy, Economic History, and Public Sector Economics.  Courses added include Quantitative Methods in Economics, which was made a requirement for the major, four more Agriculture courses as Agricultural Studies came online in 1996, a 2000-level course in the Economics of Professional Sports, and a 3000-level course in Business and Economic Forecasting.

B. Major

The Department's major changed frequently.  In 1968, after semesterization of the University's courses, the Economics major required Principles of Micro and Macro, the first semesters of Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Theory, Growth and Development, the first semesters of International Trade, Money and Banking, and Public Finance, and at least two, but not more than five, other Economics courses.  But the University had been founded with a mission was to provide "liberal education", and it interpreted the word "liberal" in a rather, well ... , liberal fashion.  After all, it was the sixties.  So as of 1969 the Faculty forbade departments to have any requirements at all for a major.

Following Faculty requirements, in 1969 the Economics major became “any ten, but not more than thirteen, Economics courses”.  In 1971, the Department was allowed to put a few more words into the calendar: that those ten courses "should include fundamental courses in Micro-economics and Macro-economics."  Note the word "should"; these weren't requirements, just suggestions.  The Department was not allowed to have specific requirements until 1982!

In 1972 the Department was allowed to add that Economics 1000 was a prerequisite for all other courses (ie, it was now required), and it was now "strongly recommended" that the ten courses "should include the fundamental courses in Micro-Economics and Macro-Economics."  In 1976 the Department was allowed to make Principles of Macro a pre-requisite for all higher macro-economics courses, and Principles of Micro a pre-requisite for all higher micro-economics courses.  The "strongly recommended" list grew that year: Statistics 1770 was added.  Statistics was taught in the Mathematics department; Statistics 1770 was the introductory statistics course.  In 1978 the "strongly recommended" list grew again: Math 1500 (Introductory Calculus) was added.

In 1982 departments were, finally, allowed to require courses for majors.  The Economics major became (and, with two changes, remains): at least ten courses in Economics including Principles of Micro and Macro, Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Theory, Economics 2900 (Statistics), and an independent study in Economics.  Math 1560 (Introductory Calculus) remains "strongly recommended".  With Statistics 1770 a pre-requisite for Economics 2900, it too became implicitly a required course for a major.

The independent study requirement needs a bit of explanation.  In 1982 the Faculty made one independent study a requirement for an Arts and Sciences degree.  The Department added independent studies courses at the 2000-, 3000-, and 4000-levels and created guidelines for each of these three.  This Faculty requirement became a burden, especially for departments, eg Psychology, which had large numbers of majors.  So it was abandoned after five years.  When the Faculty dropped it, so did the Department.  The only other change to the major was in 2007, when Economics 2750, Quantitative Methods in Economics, became a requirement.

C. Teaching Load

At the beginning – ie 1967 – the teaching load in the Department was six semester courses.  In 1974 that was reduced to five.  Other departments had made that same move earlier.  In 2004 the Dean reduced the teaching load from five to four semester courses per year.  This meant a reduction in courses that could be offered.  To partially compensate, the Dean had Townley and Davidson begin to teach sections of the Introductory course, which they continue to do.

----------------------------------------

2008 was my last year at the university.  So I end this history there.  But four interesting things I have not yet described happened during my tenure with the Department, and I want to include them as part of this history.  Two of these were outside the Department but had major effects on it, and I call these “Sideshows”.  The other two I call "Digressions": one an experiment conducted by the Department with its curriculum, the other changes in computing.

 

Sideshows

1. Business, Management, and Accounting; and the Department

When the University was formed it was very small.  Even by 1972 there were just over 1000 students. It was too small to have professional schools, with the one exception of the Faculty of Education.  But many students living in Lethbridge wanted professional degrees.  It was convenient for them to do two years at the University before moving to the University of Calgary or Alberta.  So the University had, from its beginning, "pre-professional" programs.  These were lists of courses required in order to transfer into the professional programs at the two larger provincial universities.

These programs originated at the College, initially as first-year courses only, then, when the College expanded to in 1965, second year courses.  Those programs - those lists - were brought whole to the University. The program that involved the Department was the Pre-Business program.

The Pre-Business program requirements, from 1967 through 1976, were: Principles of Micro and Macro, both semesters of Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Theory, and two accounting courses.  The latter were offered within the Department, and were taught by two accountants from Lethbridge, Rex Little and Len Watkinson,  Both were Sessional Lecturers in the Department from 1967 through 1976.

In 1976 the Faculty created a new department, the Department of Management Arts.  The faculty of this department were initially faculty members of other Faculty departments, seconded to teach a course or two.  One was Bilgin, who had already been teaching a course in the Department entitled Economics Applied to Business; this course moved to Management.  Accounting, and Little and Watkinson, also moved to Management.  Requirements for a major in Management Arts included Principles of Macro and Micro, the first semesters of Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Theory, and Statistics 1770.  In 1978 Management Arts hired Allan Hunter, an accountant, as its Chair.  Watkinson's tenure at the University ended.

In 1982 Management Arts became Management Studies, an independent School, and George Lermer, an economist, was hired as the Director.  The new School, guided by Lermer, established admission requirements.  Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Theory were not included, although the first semester of Intermediate Micro remained a requirement for the Accounting major.  Economics 2900 became an admission requirement.  The School had an Economics major.  In 1990 the School became the Faculty of Management with Lermer as its Dean.  Admission requirements for the Faculty of Management remained the same as for the School, except for tinkering caused by the introduction, and later dropping, of the Department's Pre-Principles course.  The Faculty of Management retained the Economics major.

The creation and steady expansion of, and changes within, Management had a substantial effect on the Department.  On the plus side, the Department got increases in enrollment from having Economics 2900 as a Management admission requirement.  Its having an Economics major added a few students every year to both semesters of the Intermediate Theory courses.  (My last few years, I estimate these to be eight to ten students per year.)

Everything else was negative, and reduced our enrollments.  In particular, with the creation of Management Arts, the Pre-Business program was dropped from the calendar.  Students could, of course, figure out what they needed from the University to transfer, but most simply stayed in Lethbridge and majored in Management.  Unlike the Pre-Business program, Management Arts required only the first semesters of Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Theory.  This dramatically reduced enrollment in the second semesters of those courses.  On the other hand, this "smartened those courses up" somewhat, since now only economics majors took them.  When the School of Management dropped the first semesters of Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Theory as admission requirements, enrollment in both of those dropped as well, although less so in Intermediate Micro-Theory because there were large numbers of Accounting majors who were required to take it.

This was the situation when I retired. By then Management had had two deans after Lermer, who died in a skiing accident in 2001.

2. Agricultural Studies and the Department

In 1978 Kurt Klein was hired as a sessional lecturer by the Department to teach a course in Agricultural Economics.  In 1981 the Department was given an expansion position.  The Department wanted to keep Agricultural Economics as a field, so Klein was hired as Assistant Professor in 1981 to teach these.  A course in Agricultural Economics at the 3000-level and a course in Agricultural Policy at the 4000-level became permanent.  These laid the foundations for what in 1996 became the Agricultural Studies program at the University.

In the mid-1990s, the Alberta government tied higher education funding increases to the development of new and innovative degree programs.  This funding pattern resulted in the creation of new degrees, including post-diploma degrees, at the University.  These initiatives had a direct impact on the Economics department.  In 1996, with some prodding from Klein (and several faculty members in the Geography and Biology departments who had agricultural interests), the University added an Agricultural Studies program.  The number of Agricultural courses offered by the Department expanded to six that year: two in Agricultural Policy, two in Agricultural Markets, one in Agriculture and the Environment, and one in Agricultural Issues.  A person was needed to teach the added Agriculture courses, so Allan Walburger was hired as an Assistant Professor. 

The original intention was that oversight of the program should be housed in the Department.  Klein was appointed coordinator of the program, but he resigned in less than a year.  In April 1997 Allan Walburger became coordinator of the program, a position he held until he left the University in 2006.  After that the program was coordinated out of the Dean's office.

*Editorial Note: After I retired, in 2009 the coordinating of the program returned to the Department when Dan LeRoy took over this responsibility.*

Over the next twelve years, Walburger would resign, and three new faculty members whose specialty field was Agricultural Economics were hired: LeRoy, Malla, and Ghazalian.

The initial hope was that Agricultural Studies would substantially increase enrollment in economics courses.  This did happen briefly, but the anticipated permanent enrollment increases never materialized.  In part this was because many of the Agricultural Studies students transferred in from junior and community colleges, and had already taken Principles of Economics.  The major effects of Agricultural Studies on the Department were: first, that the Department's faculty became heavily weighted to Agricultural economists; and second, that it contributed to the Department giving up Economics 1001.

Digressions

1. Experiment with a "Pre-Principles" Course

In the spring of 1987, I, then chairing the Department, came up with an idea: to have a genuine introductory economics course, at the Pre-Principles level.  I arranged a retreat to the Crowsnest Pass for all Department faculty members, where the idea was accepted, and the course was fleshed out.  All department members but one were in favour and enthusiastic about the course.  One department member was opposed, and he was never assigned to teach the course.

The new course was Economics 1001, "Introduction to Economics: Fundamental Ideas of Economics with Particular Application to the Canadian Economy", and was added in 1988.  The idea was to teach students what, as the title of a book some of us used as a text described as, The Economic Way of Thinking.  The course was also to include a brief history of economic thought from the Mercantilists and Adam Smith to the present.  Some of us had the students read  Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers and tested them on its contents.

There were three major reasons why I thought the course a good idea (and still do).  Two were pragmatic, one more philosophical.  The first pragmatic reason was that in the second half of the 1980s enrollments in economics courses were declining in virtually all North American universities.  This was being widely discussed at economics conferences, in economics journals, and at the annual meetings of the Chairs of Economics departments.  I saw the Pre-Principles course as a partial solution.  It turned out that I was right.  Our Department was unique in North America in having increases in enrollment in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The second pragmatic reason was that I thought - and still do - that introducing first-year students to economics with Principles of Micro was a mistake.  My thinking was, and still is, based on both the more philosophical reason for the course - see below - and a fact.  The fact is that in almost every university in the US, Principles of Economics was then (and still is) a second year course.  Students taking it are more mature than first-year students, and the maturity developed in that first year matters.  First-year students taking Principles of Micro here, being less mature, were dropping out of, and failing, it at significantly higher rates than in the US.  Again, I saw the Pre-Principles course as a partial solution.

Two beliefs drove my thinking about my more philosophical reason to have this course.  The first is that economics is vastly more interesting than just what is taught in Principles of Micro.  A teacher who knows the discipline - and presumably all in the Department did - could show students the wide range of economics in a non-technical way.  Our experience with the course showed that this belief was correct.

The second belief was that Principles of Micro, with it's heavy emphasis on what George Lermer and I called "calculus with funny names", turned students off.  Introduced to economics with Principles of Micro, many never took another economics course.  This belief also turned out to be correct: the Department's enrollment in other courses went up after we added the Pre-Principles course.

Requirements for a major became Economics 1001, both Principles of Micro and Macro, both Intermediate Micro- and Macro-Theory, plus Economics 2900 (and thus, implicitly, Statistics 1770).  The Department's enrollment, while it increased substantially, did not increase as much as it could, and probably should, have, because Management treated Economics 1001 as an introductory micro-economics course, and substituted it for Principles of Micro as an entry requirement.

My opinion, shared by many of the other members of the Department who were here through its duration, was (and still is) that the course was a major success.  It increased enrollments in both the Department overall - at a time when enrollments in economics departments across North America were declining substantially - and in higher level courses.  But more importantly, it gave us, as teachers, an opportunity to show students a much wider range of economic thinking than we could in Principles of Micro.  Doing that was fun for us; it made teaching more fun.  When the course was dropped, many of us, including, perhaps especially, me, thought it a huge loss.

But drop it we did.  The main reason given, to me by Ebel who was chairing the department at the time, was that its existence made transferring into the University too difficult for students who had taken introductory economics somewhere else, especially from the junior and community colleges in the province.  These students were mostly those who were transferring into Agricultural Studies at the University.  So the experiment ended, a success in the minds of many of us, especially mine.  But it put us out of "synch" with other economics departments in North America, and more importantly, with other departments in Alberta.  So it disappeared.  Requiescat in Pace!

2. Statistics, Computing, and Economics:  A Personal Journey

This digression is intended especially for the younger members of the Department (and also of the University), who all have massive computing facilities and excellent data sets at their fingertips. The digression may also help to explain why research was difficult in the early years of the Department - difficult enough that when I arrived none of the other four people in the Department had done, or were doing, any research  at all, and in 1980, just before Klein was hired to a tenure track position, and Cook replaced Adel, four of the six regular members of the department were essentially inactive in research.

I have a thesis here: that econometrics, the availability of and nature of computing, and better data sets all co-evolved.   I illustrate with a personal tale.

When I entered graduate school in 1965, statistics or econometrics were not even requirements for a PhD at the University of Colorado (CU), and this was true of many other major universities.  My first year in graduate school was the first year graduate-level econometrics was offered.  During my four years in graduate school, we, in Boulder, Colorado, were lucky to have not one, but two, of the world's largest computers: Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6400s, with 64 Kilo-Bytes of RAM (the size of a Commodore 64.)  One was at the university computing centre, the other was a couple of kilometers away at the Environmental Sciences Service Administration, a federal government agency.  Each filled a room the size of one of our classrooms in the middle of the fifth level.  They were second-generation machines and used transistors (first generation machines used vacuum tubes).

Computing was very expensive, both in time and money.  Those computers cost several million  1960's dollars and required a staff of a couple of dozen just to run.  (When they ran.  We used to suggest that "CDC" stood for "Computer Down Constantly".  When I was working with CU's computer regularly, the first question asked when arriving at work was, "Is the computer up today?")  Faculty and students could use the computer at CU, although it was rationed; one need a good grant to use the computer at ESSA.  Few faculty used even CU's - for starters almost none knew how.  I was lucky.  First, one summer for the hell of it I took a two week course in FORTRAN. Then, in my third year as a graduate student, I was hired to work  on a very richly funded research project, one with three exceptionally good data sets.  From one of these data sets I got my dissertation.

Computing then (and until the mid-1970s) could only be done in "batches" – the computers could do only one job at a time.  All information fed to the computers – both data and the programs  which told the computer what to do with the data, “control” – were on punched cards.  These were the cards that became famous for the phrase “do not bend, fold, staple, or mutilate.”  The cards were matrices, allowing one punch of an alphanumeric symbol in each of twenty-five or so rows.  Our sample sizes were as large as 9000, so each time a job was run, the 9000 data cards had to be read.  My job with the research project was to bicycle to the two computing centres each morning, pick up the previous night's results which were printed on paper, punch new control cards, replace the old control cards with the new ones, add them to the data cards, and submit the jobs.  It would take all day to run the jobs. I would go back in late afternoon and repeat the process; those jobs would be ready the next morning.

(Normally.  Doing the work for my dissertation, I discovered that the "turnaround time" - the time between submitting a job and receiving the output - which was four to six hours during regular working hours, decreased to a couple of hours between 6pm and 11pm, then dropped to fifteen to twenty minutes between 11pm and 7am.  I spent two weeks sleeping during the day and doing my computer research all night long.  I met some very interesting characters during those night-time sessions.  We had great discussions while waiting those fifteen to twenty minutes.)

It's also important to note here that when I wrote my dissertation, which was on return migration, I was required  to introduce the research with a summary of all published literature on migration.  (Most of my generation of PhDs think this should still be a requirement.)  When I did the library research for my summary in June, 1969, there were only two published papers on migration that had used econometrics.  Of those, one used census data - which isn't very useful for research on migration - and the other used a data set constructed by the researcher, at great expense in both money and time.  Almost all papers on migration published since I left graduate school have used econometrics.

I went from CU, and a 64 KB RAM computer, to Memorial University, with a 32 KB RAM computer, to Acadia University, with a 16 KB RAM computer, to the University of Lethbridge, with an 8 KB RAM computer.  I had a research grant and an excellent self-constructed data set when I arrived in Lethbridge, but using that 8 KB machine was very slow.  I spent a lot of my grant just paying students to run programs on it in batches.

In the mid-1970s - 1976 here at the University - time-sharing on main frame computers began.  The computer would spend a micro-second or so on a job, then move to spend a micro-second on another job, then on, ..., then back to the first job.  Time-sharing allowed the development and use of remote terminals. I was one of the first faculty members at the University to learn how to use those terminals.  (The following year, when I was on leave and at Carleton University, I was the only member of that department who knew how to use remote terminals.  I gave a workshop for the other quantitatively oriented members of that department.  And felt thankful that I had been at a small university - and right next door to the computing centre - when time-sharing got started.)

Over the next six or seven years, third generation main-frame computers allowed major expansion of remote terminals.  And it allowed the development of early word-processors.  The one at the University was "SCRIBE", and anyone who was here then can tell you what a major pain in the ass SCRIBE was to use.  Merle mastered it quickly of course, and most faculty members still used her to do their typing.  Then in the late 1970s, personal computers were developed and became inexpensive.  The world of computing changed, and radically.  Nevertheless, those early personal computers were still small.  The three big sellers were: IBM with 128 KBs RAM, Apple   II with 128 KBs RAM, and, the biggest seller of all time, the Commodore 64 with, of course, 64 KBs RAM.  From there, as we all know, memory doubled every few years, the price of memory halved every few years, etc.  By now, March 2014, I type, on a machine that is new, with 4 GBs RAM, two 150 GH co-processors, and a 1 TB hard drive.

As computing power increased and increased and increased, statistics and econometrics became cheap and easy.  Governments and research institutions responded by creating large, and often excellent, data sets; I'm using three in my current research.  In migration research, there are four or five fine data sets in regular use.  So, over the course of my career, econometric work went from being expensive, difficult, and therefore almost non-existent, to being cheap, easy (maybe too easy), and commonplace.

----------------------

I close with a final personal editorial comment:

The extraordinary increase in computing power, and the now commonplace use of econometrics, is a triple-edged sword.

1 – It can be, and used to be, a very good thing.  Econometrics done right, using proper data sets, has expanded our knowledge of the economic world.

2 – However, because econometrics is now so cheap and easy, most papers, in labour economics at least, contain way too much.  Despite Ed Leamer's well-known plea to "take the 'con' out of 'econometrics'", there's more "con" than ever.  Bad or misleading econometrics is everywhere.

I have refereed for labour economics and regional science journals regularly since 1974, and I still do.  I have attended at least one conference a year - sometimes a general economics conference, sometimes a regional science conference, sometimes both - since 1969.  Over time, the papers I have refereed, and papers I have discussed at conferences, have increasingly contained one or more of the following: i) large numbers of regressions that didn't address the issue the paper is concerned with; ii) regressions with way too many variables, most of them spurious, and almost all causing a lot of multicollinearity (published papers in recent years are filled with these as well); and iii) explanations of the regressions that were just plain wrong – the authors obviously didn't understand their own regressions.

3 – Cheap and easy statistical software has made doing statistics easy for students, probably way too easy.  Statistics and econometrics are now taught at the undergraduate level everywhere, which is a major change from when I was an undergraduate from 1960 to 1965.  This could be good, but, in most cases, almost certainly is not.  Just as kids don't learn how to do multiplication when their teachers have them use calculators, students don't really learn statistics when their teachers have them use of cheap easy software.  The learn what programs to run, but they don't learn how to think statistically.  Those students include many graduate students and, therefore, many young practicing economists.

I fear the last two effects now vastly outweigh the first.  This is a pity; the "economic way of thinking" means thinking statistically.  And despite the old saw, "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics", statistics and econometrics done right lead to truth.