How to Establish Pluralism at the Department Level**

Our generation is confronted with many problems including climate change, environmental damage, a global financial crisis, a palpable disparity in income and wealth, escalating debt, and a health care crisis. These problems are mutually reinforcing and will only worsen. At the center, however, is the discipline of economics itself and economics education, which obfuscates the interrelationship of our problems, inures its students to human suffering and abnegates thoughtful discussion of the human predicament. Gone are the days when only one school of thought could be deemed sufficient to educate the public and provide policy makers with a range of solutions. Gone are the days when only one school of thought in economics could claim a monopoly on knowledge while derisively dismissing the legitimacy of all others. To solve the problems of our generation we need educated citizens and economists who understand diversity and are willing to work with each other and with other social scientists. In 2001 French economics students petitioned their professors for a more realistic and pluralist teaching of economics. Since the French petition, pluralism has become widely accepted as a method of teaching. Several books have been written on how to teach pluralist economics, including John Groenewegen's Teaching Pluralism in Economics (2007); Edward Fullbrook's Pluralist Economics (Zed, 2009) and Jack Reardon's Handbook of Pluralist Economics Education (Routledge, 2009), inter alia. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to develop a systematic plan for implementing pluralism at the department level. The first section will briefly discuss the advantages of pluralism; the second section will discuss the key elements of the plan; the third section will discuss its potential problems and criticisms; the fourth will offer concluding observations. It is not my intention to offer a definitive recipe; rather these proposals are tentative and suggestive.