ABSTRACT
The successful private initiative in Rotterdam was soon followed elsewhere, as economic developments allowed the budget constraints imposed under the pressure of the economic consequences of the First World War to be loosened. In 1921 the first university faculty of economics, or rather faculty of commercial sciences as it was still called at the time, was founded at the Municipal University in Amsterdam.11 This second local initiative led to debates on the place of economics within the Dutch university system. But a national statutory regulation of the organisation and contents of academic economics did not materialise yet, and the teaching programme in Amsterdam was cast on the practically oriented mould of the trade school in Rotterdam. At the Municipal University, however, the new faculty became part of an already existing academic organisation. In that organisation ideas about the value of academic science and about the independent study of man and nature were well established. The academic culture in which the new programme in commercial sciences had to be integrated, therefore, did not permit an all too overt orientation towards the practical requirements of business life, despite the fact that preparing students for a professional career in commerce and industry had originally been an important reason for the founding of the new faculty. This was illustrated by the contents of the teaching programme of the faculty of commercial sciences, in which practical subjects were never really integrated. The teaching programme in Amsterdam did, however, entail training in research techniques and statistics, taught from 1930 onwards by Tinbergen – who, in 1933, was also appointed ‘Extra-ordinary’ Professor in Statistics and Mathematics at the Netherlands Trade School in Rotterdam.
