College teaching is actually a worthy professional calling. I don't mean being a professor who must balance undergraduate and graduate teaching with research demands. No, I mean teaching economics to undergraduates. As James Buchanan has argued, the primary justification for the salary that we earn is our ability to communicate to students the principles of the spontaneous order of the market process. By this criteria there are some great professors that I have been exposed to in my career. Israel Kirzner might be the best professor of economics that I have ever encountered. Ken Elzinga of UVA is certainly in that same company. But both of those men taught at major universities and established themselves with strong research contributions. Paul Heyne was also a legendary teacher in the large lecture hall format.
But there are scores of teachers in the liberal arts colleges scattered across our country. I am a big believer in liberal arts colleges being the product of one myself. In fact, my professors at Grove City College were fantastic teachers and Dr. Sennholz was a dynamic and engaging economics teacher. I recently visited Hampden Sydney College to give a lecture. I also visited classrooms the next morning taught by Professor Tony Carilli and Professor Chris Coyne. Carilli and Coyne are actually master teachers and I am convinced that the education a young man can receive at HSC in economics must be among the best that is offered anywhere in the world. In fact, I was impressed with the entire campus and the educational experience offered at HSC. The students were among the most disciplined, respectful, intelligent and mature young men that I have ever met (and it is all young men because it is a single-sex school). In fact, I think HSC is the best example of the high quality of education that liberal arts colleges and single-sex colleges can provide that I have ever been exposed to in over 20 years of visiting colleges and universities throughout North America, Europe, and Latin America.
Teaching college economics is indeed a worthy calling that the vast majority of young PhDs should embrace with pride and professionalism. The academic culture downgrades teaching and exalts research, but for the vast majority of intellectuals the greatest chance they have to impact the hearts and minds of the next generation is through their teaching. A master teacher like Carilli can influence a young man's life for the better. Or in the case of someone like me, the exposure to a teacher like Hans Sennholz proved more transformative than would have been the wildest dreams of my previous teachers, parents, family or friends.
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