Teaching

The teaching method at Oxford consisted of a tutorial of usually between one to three students and his/her tutor and lectures at the University level which undergraduates from all colleges could attend.

David was, by the accounts of students and colleagues alike, a brilliant teacher. He gave one-hour tutorials from ten to one in the morning and four to seven in the late afternoon. He would eat lunch at home (across the High Street in number 62A) or in college depending on his schedule. (His salary included a number of free meals.) University lectures would also be part of his weekly schedule, as well as college meetings, PPE meetings and faculty meet­ings at times during term.

The reading list for economics was comprehensive, including mathematics and original treatises in economics such as The Wealth of Nations works by Joan Robinson, John Hicks and many others. A textbook on economics was recommended (Paul Samuelson’s was the first). The level of teaching and final examination questions were very high. The student was required to have fully grasped the basic theory and to be able to discuss higher level questions in economics. David taught both microeconomics and macroeconomics and the mathematical formulations of each when they were required.

When (David) started to study economics his first reaction was how easy it was. I remember vividly his typically self-deflating description of a hectic, stimulat­ing week in which he devoured all eight hundred pages of Alfred Marshall’s “Principles” turning all the arguments into equations—and pretty simple equa­tions at that. And then it dawned on him that that was not the point. He came quickly to share the skepticism of Marshall himself (also a mathematician who took up economics because of his social concerns).. He used to enjoy quoting the great man: “Every economic fact...stands in relation to cause and effect to many other facts...and since it never happens that all of them can be expressed in numbers, the application of exact mathematical methods to those which can is nearly always a waste of time, while in the large majority of cases it is posi­tively misleading” (italics in original).

McMahon continued:

The fact that David could clearly do the mathematics if he wanted to was a great strength in his arguments against those who increasingly tried to avoid the hard parts of economic problems by solving the easy parts with equations. He was from first to last a believer in political economy rather than economics and therefore that PPE was a genuine discipline rather than, as it was often taught in other colleges, three different subjects slung together (remarks made at David’s memorial service, Magdalen College Chapel, Oxford, 20 October 2001).

In 1959, David published an article entitled “Mrs. Robinson on Simple Accumulation: A Comment with Algebra” (Worswick 1959). He says at the beginning of the article that ‘The best reason I can give for making this trans­lation is that I was driven to do it because I found myself coming adrift more than once in following her argument' (ibid.: 125). He congratulates Robinson ‘for striving to examine each successive step [of] her argument afresh' in her book The Accumulation of Capital, but then says that there are ‘still traces of the habitual modes of thought which turn out to be unnecessary...and which might well, if left unexposed, be seriously misleading' (ibid.).

Robert Solow used David's mathematical model in his volume, Capital Theory and the Rate of Return, although there was no comment from others nor from Joan Robinson herself. But then no one likes to be taken to task in public, and David should perhaps have known this.

The following are some more testimonials about David's style of teaching. Michael Artis writes:

His style was to let the student find out for himself how a particular hypothesis “worked”—the joy of seeing the discovery in the student's face was one of the things that David savored. And the method worked to bring confidence to the student to analyse and solve a problem. It also ensured a better grasp of what was learnt than rote learning could ever do (Artis 2003: 517).

Here's Paul Dodyk, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford:

[David] was articulate, considerate, interesting and interested. He was never dictatorial, dismissive, sarcastic or coercive. With David as your tutor, you wanted to learn. His suggested readings for our sessions were the beginning, not the limit of what I wanted to know. He taught, and caused me to learn, a great deal of economics. He also taught me that blowing the place up and starting over was probably not a great idea (remarks made at David's memorial service).

This comment reflects the fact that David was never a communist.

Here is another student, David Stout, writing in a letter to Sylvia after David's death:

I had the luck to have David as a dear friend and example throughout my scrambled career. No one has remotely influenced me so much. I always wanted him to be there and he was. When I walked in funk and despair out of one of the Webb Medley papers, David walked me round the deer park and talked me back into the Examination Schools. He talked me into trying for a Prize Fellowship and helped me to learn to teach by his own example and his trust.

I not only loved being in David's company, I admired him and wanted to be like him. His gaiety and his honesty, his acuity and his sympathy I found unfailing.

Here again is Kit McMahon: ‘He was the most un-pompous, unstuffy of men, and the best of colleagues' (remark made at David's memorial service).

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