I’d like to reply to someone who responded to my recent post entitled “National Survey Vindicates Orthodox Catholic Colleges”. Please go to that post to see the full text of the objections to my comments from “Richard, PhD”. Here’s my reply to his response:

Richard, Thanks for your helpful and thought-provoking comments.

You note that you “wrote this message too quickly” because you had to get back to work. I understand. I also wrote my own initial and evidently provocative post too quickly because I too had to get back to work. Such is the nature of writing for blogs. One consequence of my haste was the sweeping dismissal of economics per se, which was not really what I intended. We offer economics as a major at Ave Maria and I have nothing but respect for the AMU economics faculty. My principal argument was simply that the survey was clearly quirkily insistent on economics being adopted as a requirement. I maintain that other subjects not seen as necessary by the ACTA have more reason to merit inclusion as requirements. I note, for instance, that you maintain that “economics is first and foremost a field of philosophy”. I couldn’t agree more, which is why it shouldn’t be treated as a so-called “science”, except in the broadest sense that everything, including philosophy, is a science, i.e. a branch of knowledge. If economics is a branch of philosophy, isn’t it singularly odd that the ACTA thinks that economics is necessary but that philosophy isn’t?