I’m not a fan of paternalism but in one area it has its place: education.

Students should be able to choose from a range of disciplines to find the one that best suits their inclinations, interests and future career ambitions. But if a student wants a branch of biology that caters to his creationist beliefs, or a vaccine-sceptic only wants medical textbooks that quote Jenny McCarthy, well, the professors and the universities should politely decline.

Theology schools exist for those who want to be learning religion rather than science. And nutty lifestyle conferences cater for those who prefer holistic medicine. If a professor wants to go on to do research in those areas – fair enough. But it should not be part of the undergraduate curriculum.

But what happens when bums-on-seats tertiary funding models start making these kinds of offerings tempting? If the pro-vice chancellor thinks there is a big potential market for anti-science science degrees, and holds the funding lines, and never much liked science to begin with, well, there could be a problem.

Fortunately, we have not seen much of that – yet – in the bench sciences, apart from the slow erosion of maths requirements to cater to declining student numeracy. But every month seems to bring a new call for overhauling the economics curriculum – to the cheers of lecturers in the softer parts of the business schools and arts faculties. The critics reckon economics too rationalistic, too enamoured with free-markets, too sceptical of government intervention and simply too uncaring.

The latest of these came from Martin Parker, professor of organisation and culture at the University of Leicester. At The Conversation, he blames global capitalism for killing the planet and wishes there were greater focus on researching alternatives to capitalism – never mind the comparative environmental records of Western and Eastern Europe in the 20th century.

But his is only the latest. A year before that, students at Manchester University earned a fair bit of media attention for criticising the heavily mathematical focus of their programme. A decade before that, it was French students at University of Paris and their “Post-Autistic Economics” movement.

The critics have a point, in part. A proper education in economics should include history of economic thought as well as coverage of some heterodox (non-mainstream) approaches, where it can be done rigorously.

But in three-year undergraduate programmes where students are also forced to cover core business curriculum areas in accounting and management, and where there is growing pressure to add compulsory courses in cultural competencies, and provide internships for credit, departments have to make harder choices.

Is it better to provide undergraduate students with the tools they need to understand the discipline and to read the serious critiques of the mainstream if they wish, or to provide a once-over-lightly approach to the core tools and to the critics?

For the 11 years I taught in Canterbury’s economics department, we provided what I think was the country’s best technical training in microeconomics. That was due, in no small part, to my good friend, and then-colleague, Associate Professor Seamus Hogan.

Trained a generation

Seamus died last Friday, aged 53, of a brain aneurysm. He trained a generation of Canterbury economists. His intermediate-level course in microeconomic theory gave every student the technical background they would need to understand either mainstream problems or those coming from the fringes. His honours-level capstone course built on those foundations to show students the cases in which the standard model worked, the cases in which it didn’t, and the ethical presuppositions of different frameworks.

In highlighting just what was meant by an efficiency norm, it was deeply critical of parts of the mainstream consensus. But it simply could not be done without the technical and mathematical apparatus established earlier on.

To put it tritely, you can’t think outside of the box unless you understand the box very well indeed. Sure, you can stand on the fringes and yell about the evils of neoliberalism, as many of those re-tweeting Parker’s article like to do, but your critique will be as empty as Jenny McCarthy’s condemnation of vaccines. Seamus taught his students to build the boxes and then twirl them on their index fingers.

Seamus’ students knew how lucky they were to have received proper training in economics with him, rather than a Post-Autistic-styled curriculum. A memorial webpage is already filled with their tributes.

One of his students, who spent time at the Reserve Bank before heading off for a doctorate at Berkeley, rightly identified him as the “key factor in making Canterbury economics graduates so well represented in Wellington.” Seamus set and maintained the rigorous academic culture in the department that would not compromise the quality of the teaching programme and that would not pander to trendy, but ultimately fruitless, critiques of the mainstream.

Being able to understand the standard framework matters because so much is built on it.

Discussions of inequality, for example, hinge on things like Gini coefficients. But the Gini coefficient is built on a specific social welfare function – mathematical ways of defining what is meant by “good” or “better.”

The social welfare function on which the Gini coefficient is built weighs inequality against increases in income. In that framework, increases in inequality are bad, increases in income are good and an increase in inequality that comes with an increase in income can be either good or bad depending on relative sizes of both changes.

If you accept the Gini coefficient, you accept the underlying welfare framework. And as recent Treasury work by John Creedy and Christopher Ball has shown, the increase in inequality and increase in incomes that came consequent to the reforms of the 1980s are good, as defined by that framework.

To complain about the 1980s reforms because of the increase in Gini inequality is nonsensical in a specific way: it rejects the framework on which the statistic is built. Sensible critiques can be mounted from the Left but economics departments do a disservice to students who would wish to criticise the mainstream if they leave them without the tools to launch a coherent attack.

Earthquakes brought budget cuts. Scepticism of the value of rigorous theoretical approaches relative to Manchester-style critiques meant the end of Seamus’ courses, despite their popularity. Seamus died six months after moving his family to Wellington, where he had joined Victoria University’s School of Government.

Academia needs a little paternalism. The tributes of those who have gone through the courses should count for more than the whims of those who do not yet know better, and now will not get the chance to.