In 1968

The Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) was the most important institution for the identification and nurturing of a community of radical economists. The Union for Radical Political Economics was founded in September 1968 at Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, by junior faculty members and graduate students. The immediate circumstances of the founding of URPE were closely related to the anti-Vietnam War movement and to a nationally divisive event. In August 1968, Chicago police violently charged against demonstrators at the Democratic Party Convention. The aftershocks of the police riot were felt in economics through a boycott of the city by some of the rank and file. On its first anniversary, URPE had swelled in members and in ambition. At the next annual convention of the American Economic Association, radicals read a list of grievances charging their peers as sycophants of inequality, alienation, destruction of the environment, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy, and in so doing choosing for themselves an oppositional attitude toward their colleagues, their values, and practices.