At the Edge of Camelot

This book tells the story of an academic department that underwent rapid, wrenching changes at a time and in a place that one would not have expected them to have occurred. The time was the late 1960s through the 1970s and the place was a public university heavily dependent on state funding. The story told covers the particulars of the background for these events relating to the University of Massachusetts, the political activism of the period, and the state of the economics profession. It describes the events themselves in considerable detail, the multi-year turmoil within the economics department associated with them, the eventual resolution of that turmoil into an intellectually exciting and friendly atmosphere, the significance of the events in terms of academic endeavor, and their legacy for the economics profession.