ABSTRACT
One of Dan’s major responsibilities at the University of Michigan was the instruction of large introductory economics courses. The experience of both the students and the teaching assistants in these courses was different from that of their peers. Fusfeld taught the course from a critical and historical point of view, The Age of the Economist and the Principles serving as perfect tools for such an approach. (For the majority of the graduate students who assisted him in teaching the course, this was their only exposure to the ideas of economists’ forebears.) His examinations required critical and creative thinking; ‘rote answers earned at most a C’. In place of multiple-choice questions, students were required to write essays; although it took the teaching assistants many long hours to grade exams, the questions forced students to think.
