From time to time one digs up a nugget in the secondary literature that deserves its own post. Harvard President Charles W. Eliot (from 1869 to 1909), an advocate of putting more political economy into the curriculum, trash talks the quality of economics instruction when he took office.
Here two textbooks that had been inflicted upon Harvard College students in the pre-Dunbar days.
Francis Bowen (1856). The Principles of Political Economy Applied to the Condition, the Resources, and the Institutions of the American People. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1856.
Francis Bowen (1870). American Political Economy, including Strictures on the Management of the Currency and the Finances since 1861. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
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Harvard’s retired president,
Charles W. Eliot, looking back at economics instruction à la Bowen
In respect to the teaching of political economy, or economics, I can perhaps give you some notion of the great change which has taken place since 1869 by describing the work done by Professor Francis Bowen, the only Harvard professor who then dealt at all with the subject of political economy. He gave only about a quarter of his time to that subject, because he had so many other subjects to deal with. His idea of teaching political economy was to write an elementary book on the subject, and to require the senior class — it was a required subject of the senior year — to read that book. He gave no lectures; he sometimes commented upon those pages of the book which had been assigned as the lesson of the day, to be repeated in the recitation room by those students who had studied the lesson. It is a long way from that condition of things to the present organization of the Department of Economics.
Source: Charles William Eliot (1923), Harvard Memories. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 70-71.
Image Source: Harvard University. Hollis Images. Portrait (1891) of Francis Bowen by Edwin Tryon Billings.