I’ve just pulled a few things from Justin’s letter that really concerned me and I haven’t had the time to really sit and go through it thoroughly. I agree with Jon though, it’s a little odd that you are making such sweeping generalisations about Economics being and Engineering student isn’t it?
Orthodox economics also fails to analyse society accurately, so I don’t see how Political Economy should thus be any less valued than it. Unfortunately, being a student only of ECOP and not of ECON I am in no position to assert that one is more valued than the other or posits a more complete view of the economy than the other … much the same way that you aren’t either, dear Justin. 
a) Education isn’t profitable, should we just stop teaching the kids?
b) Nursing isn’t profitable, should we just let all the sick die?
c) Garbage collection probably isn’t profitable either, should we just let garbage collect everywhere then?
There are plenty of unprofitable sections of society, and despite the best efforts of our government to shut all of them down, its an inevitability that some things just can’t always make a profit. In terms of your postulate that its unprofitable purely because it
fails to accurately predict people, well can anyone? Orthodox economics doesn’t do this either.
As for funding ourselves, well that’s an entirely different argument altogether. Dr. Wolziner’s comments about the student with the big tuition cheques really doesn’t make much sense at all, and effectively, cutting funding to departments all across the University is an act of discrimination against HECs students, which is a bit like treating people like aliens in their own country.
Can’t argue with this, but I think you are simplifying things too simply. ECOP doesn’t just teach socialist economic paradigms, a large portion of this semester was devoted to Neo-Classical economic thinking as well as a deconstruction of all the other paradigms. Actually, the conclusion tended to be that all of the economic paradigms got it wrong, only because, they, like you, were simplifying the role of human behaviour in Economics too much. But again, that’s rather irrelevant to the actual discussion at hand.
Actually, USyd is still the only university in Australia to offer ECOP.
Actually, ASIO/ASIS, the Productivity Commission and the Australian Security and Investments Commission (to name a few) have all been looking specifically for students from USyd with ECOP majors/honours in the last few years.
Well you got it in one there didn’t you? The articles were all written by different people and thus, you can’t expect complete objectivity. I know for a fact that Zach is actually quite pro-Keynesian, but snaps to him for being able to look at it objectively, maybe because he isn’t such an old hand with it as the other guys. Gabrielle will always vehemently defend feminist economics rightly or wrongly because that’s her field of specialty. I won’t deny that Stilwells involvement with the Greens plays a pivotal role in shaping the nature of the department, but with Gabrielle now as chair, this is changing (not necessarily for the better)
