I'm in the awkward position of wanting to strongly agree and disagree with you at the same time. I did two degrees here: economics and arts(philosophy and reli

I'm in the awkward position of wanting to strongly agree and disagree with you at the same time. I did two degrees here: economics and arts(philosophy and religious studies...as in history and anthropology, not theology)...which I think made me one of about three people in the entire university bridging the left/right subject divide. My history, anthropology and philosophy classes were consistently professional: empirical, critical, draw from sources, develop thesis, discuss, defend, attack. Once you moved over into anything connected with contemporary economics/politics, it was a different story, and that goes for both my economics or my political economy/philosophy classes (that's right or left for those that need to translate the euphemisms). That there's a certain infiltration of "leftism" in some of the Errr...more contemporary/recently invented arts fields, I don't want to argue because I think it's largely true. But if I'm honest, my economics degree was essentially indoctrination as well: alarmingly ahistorical (those of us who did economic history classes were in the minority), rote memorisation of models, never was the idea of empirically testing or competing our ideas ever floated, and those few of us who actually did read the primary sources or history of the field quickly found that most appeals to such names (Smith, Locke, Ricardo, Keynes, Marx, Say, Malthus, Marshall, blah blah blah) were often mythical figures and misappropriation rather than connected to their actual words, times or contexts. Look, maybe things have moved on in ten years, but I doubt it, and my uni had a decent reputation for economics at the time...which I'm now thinking is directly tied to their ability to pump out large numbers of unthinking orthodox automatons...