Memories of the Department of Economics
by
David H. Ciscel, Professor Emeritus

I came to the Economics Department in Fall 1973 as an assistant professor of economics from Drake University. I believe I was offered $14,000 for a nine month contract – a salary so large that I was excited about coming to a place (Memphis) that did not look very promising. The Department chair was Dr. Kurt Flexner. He had become Chair in 1968 or 1969 after the Department was forcibly moved from the College of Arts and Sciences to the College of Business. He had two other faculty who worked closely with him: Dr. Roger Chisholm and Dr. Arthur Bayer. The three of them were attempting to convert the Department from a teaching department into an academic research department. It was this shift that attracted me. The University also owned a Xerox Sigma 7, a giant main-frame computer that used CRTs and tape instead of cards – perfect for my executive compensation research.

Memphis State University was strictly a teaching institution. Kurt Flexner had promised me a 3 course per semester teaching load. When I arrived, I was informed that MSU was a 4 course per semester operation – only department chairs received 3 per semester. After much negotiation, I received 3 per semester based on my promise to teach one graduate seminar per semester. Flexner also promised moving money ($2,000). Once I arrived, it was explained that MSU did not pay moving money to assistant professors. More negotiation followed, and I received a small grant to study executive compensation in lieu of moving money.

The Department of Economics was on the 4th floor of business building. It was the only department where all of the faculty had doctoral degrees. There was some business faculty hostility towards economics since the all-PhD faculty had been accomplished by pushing some professors without doctoral degrees into other departments.

The department had several professors. The names I remember were Drs. John Reid (later Associate Dean in the early 1980s and Economics Coordinator during the bad days of the 1990s when departments were temporarily abolished), Don Wells (later a department Chair), Coldwell Daniel, Fetus “Jack’ Viser (department Chair before Flexner), CS Pyun (later moved to Finance), Tom Depperschmidt, Bob Dean, Professor Davis, and Gabe Racz. They were nice folks, but generally they had been beaten down by the oppressive atmosphere in the college and university. The Department was politically liberal – meaning most members were opposed to the racism of the region and the campus. From an economics point of view, the Department was very micro-oriented; interested in the efficiency of free and regulated markets.

Dr. Flexner was as supportive of academic research as was possible under the circumstances. There was money to travel to conferences, though we often used a University van and went as a group. The department always sent people to the Southern Economics Association, the Southwestern Social Sciences Association, the MidSouth Academy of Economics and Finance, and American Economics Association. I was able to present 3-4 papers each year, giving me a chance to test my ideas with regional scholars. The Department had few contacts with Journal editors, so network building (a term unheard of in those days) was extremely important.

The Department offered three courses in the undergraduate curriculum: Principles of Micro and Marco, plus Money and Banking. The Dean, Dr. Markle, was an old institutional money and banking specialist, so that course was a command performance for the Department. We also offered several courses in the MBA – which was broken into Core I and Core II curricula. In addition, the Department had a B.A. and a M.A. that it had brought with it from the A&S College during the forced move. The department had a significant number of majors. Economics was still seen the basis of a business education by both faculty and students.

In the next couple of years, Flexner hired several other research professors at the assistant professor level. Dr. Tom Carroll, Dr. KK Fung and Dr. Michael Gootzeit were added in 1974 and 1975. Tom Carroll became my regular research partner. We published important work on executive compensation, including two REStat papers that are still cited 30 years later. Dr. Richard Evans came in the fall of 1976. It was the beginning of a real research faculty. The output of the department during these years was so great that each year we tended to do more paper presentations and more publications than the rest of the business faculty put together. This was also the time when the influence of the department was very strong. We proposed and led the movement to require a semester of calculus for all business undergraduate students. Our allies in the project were the accountants and the quantitative management faculty.  In the late 1970s, Dr. John Gnuschke came to direct the Center for Manpower Studies. His initial appointment was in the management department, but after a number of years he joined the economics faculty. That resulted in a closer relationship between the Department and the CMS and the Bureau of Business and Economic Research.

Around 1978 Tom Depperschmidt became the Chair of the Department. He placed a greater emphasis on teaching. As a University of Texas institutionalist, he was interested in hiring a less orthodox department. Increasingly, the quality of the other business faculty was rising, resulting in more competition for the economists, and making it more difficult for the economists to influence college decisions. Also, we went through the early 1980s recession which resulted in large losses of resources throughout the university.  Depperschmidt hired Dr. Ben Uzarou, a managerial economics professor. He also hired two other professors. Neither of them stayed and I have forgotten their names. It was during Depperschmidt’s time as Chair that the College changed to the Fogelman College of Business and Economics. The Dean was ME Bond, an economist who came to MSU from Arizona State University.

In the late 1970s, the University adopted systematic tenure and promotion procedures. Before that the Dean and the Chair tended to make most decisions without documentation. The new procedures tended to change a lot as they were improved. I moved through the ranks to professor and into tenure testing this new system. During this time, I was President of the Academic Senate (predecessor to the Faculty Senate). I also worked with John Gnuschke and the staff of the Center for Manpower Studies, building my interest in the regional economy. I wrote my first interdisciplinary paper with Dr. Tom Collins, Chair of the Anthropology Department.

Sometime in the late 1970s, the College, under pressure from the Department, added managerial economics to the undergraduate curriculum while dropping money and banking.  Dr. Barbara Vatter, an economic historian, was also hired. She was very successful at recruiting women as majors, but she left after 6 years. In the early 1980s, we hired a team: Dr. Howard Tuckman, Distinguished Professor of Economics, and his wife, Dr. Barbara Tuckman. Howard wrote in the areas of income and wealth, but he quickly changed to healthcare economics after joining our faculty. Dr. Cyril Chang joined his research agenda when he came to the Department from one of the SUNYs. Howard served as interim Dean during the late 1990s before leaving to be a Dean elsewhere. Barbara was a labor economist. She worked with the Bureau. I wrote a couple of research papers with her. She became very ill after her second child was born and the illness forced her to permanently retire. During this same time we hired Dr. Kanji Hatani, an international affairs economist. I never knew him well.

I became Chair of the Department in 1983. The College was still run by Dean M.E. Bond. Though he was an economist, he was not noted for being friendly to the Department. I put an emphasis on applied microeconomics. In 1986, I received the University Distinguished Research Award. We hired two professors during these years: Dr. Karen Pickerill and Dr. Julie Heath. Dr. Pickerill was interested in regional development and business economics. She worked closely with the Bureau of Business and Economic Research. She left for private industry after 5 or 6 years. Dr. Heath specialized in labor and economic education. She also worked with the BBER. I wrote many articles in labor and gender economics with Julie Heath over the years. She stayed with the Department, becoming Chair in the late 1990s. She was responsible for rebuilding the numbers of economics majors after the drastic decline in the 1990s.

In 1986, I left the Department to become Associate Dean for Graduate Programs in the Fogelman College under Dean J. Taylor Sims. I did not return until around 1999. However, I taught either in the Executive MBA program or one of the big sections of Principles of Microeconomics for the Department almost every semester during those years. Dr. Richard Evans took over as Chair when I left. The Department reached its maximum size – 21 faculty – under Dr. Evans.

During my years away, I moved to Dean of the Graduate School and then as Senior Researcher at the Bureau of Business and Economic Research. I also supervised three economics dissertations from a distance: Drs. Jeff Wallace, Joe Wiengarten and David Sharp. I came back to the Department when I received a three-year research contract from the Consumer Affairs Division of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. I did two studies with them: one on rural economic development in the Delta and one on Urban Sprawl in the Memphis MSA.

Returning to the Department was difficult. The faculty had changed. Emphases in research had changed. And I was increasingly out of date in research methods. The new permanent faculty were Drs. David Kemme, Bill Smith, Rose Rubin, Pinaki Bose, and Shelley White-Means. Other faculty came and went. I worked closely with Dr. Barbara Ellen Smith in the Center for Research for Women on interdisciplinary topics. And I tended to publish in the institutionalist Journal of Economic Issues. However, the Department allowed me to keep a research appointment, so I ended my 33 years at the University with a 2-2 teaching load.

I never left the UM Department of Economics. I tried a couple of times, but the University of Memphis always looked better than the next best alternative. In my last couple of years, I was elected President of the Academic Senate again. I also received the Distinguished Teaching Award. During my years at University of Memphis, I taught dozens of sections of Principles of Microeconomics in the big lecture halls on the first floor of the business building. I also taught Government Regulation, Industrial Organization, Labor Economics and Managerial Economics at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Both the department and the university honored me with my last promotion in 2006: Professor Emeritus.