On the wall of her office, among honors earned over her 32-year tenure at Denison, Professor of Economics Robin Bartlett sports a photograph of her first class at Denison in 1974. She points to the students in the photo, smiling men dressed in polyester suits, hair touching their shoulders. One woman is among them. “They taught me how to teach,” she says wistfully. Whipping equations across the board fell flat that first year out of graduate school. She turned to the Wall Street Journal and found that through discussion of daily economic news, theory took root. Play to your strengths, she concluded. Now, with the Internet, Bartlett continues to bring real world economics to her students. She can’t always explain the country’s economic behaviors, but she can engage her students to think about these things for themselves.
LECTURING DOESN’T APPEAL TO ME.
I don’t get to know the students or get new insights into the material. So I try to do what I do best—help them find answers to their questions. The Internet gets us to primary sources. If they want to learn about the Federal Reserve, we go to the Federal Reserve’s web site. If they want to know about fiscal policy, we go to the Congressional Budget Office’s web site. Teaching becomes a more cooperative effort.
I KNOW WELL THE ECONOMIC WORLD I GREW UP IN.
The students’ world is totally different. If you listen to them you get insight—they’re scared about terrorism. I went through the get-under-your-desk and the bomb shelter thing in the ’50s and all. But they actually saw the Twin Towers fall.
MY TEACHING IS REALLY ABOUT HELPING STUDENTS
create economic knowledge for themselves. I’ve done lots of research about the impact of race and gender on either occupational segregation or earnings. Last year, one of my students, James Klein ’06, a math major, suggested women students were different from men in their political perspective. We had been talking about why so few women become economic majors. Women are half of all lawyers, half of undergraduate mathematics majors; physics is the only field still as reticent as economics for women. He thought this was something he could pursue for his final paper. There’s a sociological theory that says you stay in a major that feels right to you and what feels right comes from your basic political and cultural beliefs. He found that women are, in general, more liberal than men, so they don’t persist in some fields because those fields don’t fit their political leanings. On the other hand, men tend to have a little more conservative scheme about their beliefs, so they thrive in economics. Other studies show that women get lower grades in economics than in other subjects—well, it just doesn’t feel comfortable to them, so they don’t do their best.
IN 2003, I RECEIVED THE CAROLYN SHAW BELL AWARD [from the American Economics Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession] for promoting women in the profession. I took what I learned here at Denison through teaching and applied it to mentoring women in the profession. This award was the highlight of my career because Carolyn was my mentor. I’ve known her for 25 years. She just kept opening doors for women in economics. Last count, there were 68 women with Ph.D.’s in economics across the country and they were all her students. She wrote to you all the time, and she was brutally honest about your work. She would take the time to read my work. You could walk away with scars. But if you listened to what she said, you’d have a publishable article.
“OH, WE DO ALL THIS FOR OUR CHILDREN,” everybody says. What a legacy to leave for our children—more debt than we’ve ever accumulated, even in World War II, in terms of the actual dollar amount. There are only two ways we can remedy the situation. One is to tax people to pay it back. We’re not taxing people for the war, and we need to be honest that this war is costing us money. Or, if you really believe in this war you would sign up to go serve or pay the $20,000 or more per person it is costing us. And it goes on. We owe too much to China. What if China doesn’t want to loan us money any more, then what do we do? We could settle this debt thing; we could sell Alaska, for example. Land is the only wealth we own. These are the kinds of things we talk about.
THE ADVANCE FORECAST ON GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCTS came out last week. Depending on which columnists you read, either the sky is falling or it’s just a temporary adjustment in the market. So, I tell my students to go to the source, the Department of Commerce. They’ll find 50 pages, all kinds of numbers with historical data. Did the reports exaggerate? I want them to know enough economics to go out there and form their own opinions.
THEY KNOW I REALLY WANT TO BE A CO-LEARNER with them. When I’m finishing up a paper, I’ll take it to my class. I tell them to read it and then let’s rip it apart. It’s not a pretty process. This is a draft. It’s like sausage. I allow them to watch me think. It’s about mutual collaboration. I want them to connect with me, with the material and with each other. And to realize that they can do it on their own if they have to. I teach economics as if it matters.