Refining the Content of the AGEC Accreditation Handbook

The AGEC Accreditation Handbook and Self-Evaluation Guide has been revised several times since the first drafts were produced in 2016 and 2017. The Handbook contains information for accreditation applicants, AGEC reviewers, and members of the Board of Governors responsible for administering AGEC policies and procedures. It includes the accreditation standards, eligibility for accreditation, timelines, and self-study and site visit guidelines. It is the central document for the AGEC accreditation process. Handbook revisions, drawn from the experience of accrediting programs, have been for the purposes of clarifying expectations and simplifying the application process. This presentation highlights modifications included in the 2020 Handbook, which simplify the self-study outline and site visit guidelines, and the 2021 modifications, which clarify the “Mapping Course Matrix” (displaying AGHE competencies covered in program courses) and add an “Assessment Matrix” for measuring acquisition of the competencies and improving the program as needed.

Cheryl Wall, In Memoriam

The distinguished critic Professor Cheryl A. Wall (1948–2020) was the Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her path-breaking scholarship in two highly influential monographs, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995) and Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (2005), helped to ensure that twentieth-century Black women writers were recognized and valued for their power, genius, and complexity. Her most recent book, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay (2018), places the essay form at the center of African American literary achievement. Throughout her long career she supported and enabled Black students, and championed racial diversity and gender equality at every level of the university. An Associate Editor of James Baldwin Review, she was the most generous and astute of readers, as well as a wise editor. In this memorial section, fifteen colleagues, former students, and interlocutors share their remembrances and honor her legacy.

The Shock Doctrine Comes to Canada: Laurentian University’s Insolvency Claim and the Neoliberal Tide

During the depths of COVID-19, Laurentian University, a small Canadian postsecondary institution located in the mid-sized city of Sudbury Canada, declared that it was insolvent and was legally allowed to terminate one-third of its faculty and cut almost one-half of its academic programmes. This historically unprecedented attack on a Canadian public institution utilized a Federal corporate court process, the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA), a piece of legislation akin to the US Chapter 11 process. The result of the still-ongoing process saw the university Administration and Board of Governors working against the interests of the community, targeting the arts, Indigenous, Francophone and working-class communities. This article poses the question ‘to whom do universities belong, and at what point does a publicly funded university stop being a collective “social good” – responsible to the society that spawned it – and start being a stand-alone organization that serves private interests?’

Monetary Policy Rules vs Discretion: Social Cost and Benefits

In this article it is discussed the new monetary policy, the new instruments (monetary policy tools) that the Fed introduced after 2008 and 2020, the different monetary policy rules, and the social cost and benefits of this policy is measured. The first major Fed’s changes were on 12/20/2008 by altering the fed funds market in a number of different ways: (1) Zero fed funds rate. (2) The Fed started paying interest on reserves held by the bank or on behalf of depository institutions at Reserve Banks, subject to regulations of the Board of Governors, effective October 1, 2011 and interest on the overnight reverse repurchase agreement in 2014. (3) The close to zero deposit rates. (4) The Fed abolished the required reserves by making them since March 26, 2020 zero. The social cost is very high with these “innovated” policies. This zero federal funds target rate monetary policy is against depositors (bail in cost) and taxpayers (bail out cost); it is an unfair public policy and an anti-social monetary policy; and at the same time it is a risky one because it has created enormous bubbles in the stock market and a creeping high inflation. The different monetary policy rules reveal the unjustifiable low policy target rates. The latest monetary policy combined with the loss of self-sufficiency, the outsourcing, the unfair international trade, the recent peculiar coronavirus pandemic, and the current divisions inside the country are generating many challenges and risks for the future, which will cause the social cost to exceed the social benefits. JEL classification numbers: E52, E58, E4, E44, E23, D6. Keywords: Monetary Policy, Central Banks and Their Policies, Money and Interest Rates, Financial Markets and the Macro-economy, Production, Social Welfare.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS AT THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM DURING THE 1960S

In this paper, we build on data on officials of the Federal Reserve System, oral history repositories, and hitherto underresearched archival sources to unpack the tortuous path toward crafting an institutional and intellectual space for postwar economic analysis within the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. We show that growing attention to new macroeconomic research was a reaction to both mounting external criticisms against the Fed’s decision-making process and the spread of new macroeconomic theories and econometric techniques. We argue that the rise of the number of PhD economists working at the Fed is a symptom rather than a cause of this transformation. Key to our story are a handful of economists from the Board of Governors’ Division of Research and Statistics (DRS) who did not hold a PhD but envisioned their role as going beyond mere data accumulation and got involved in large-scale macroeconometric model building. We conclude that the divide between PhD and non-PhD economists may not be fully relevant to understand both the shift in the type of economics practiced at the Fed and the uses of this knowledge in the decision-making process. Equally important was the rift between different styles of economic analysis.