Q&A with Tony Aspromourgos Emeritus Professor Tony Aspromourgos (PhD 1986) retired from fulltime employment at the University in July 2019.
How has Economics changed over the period you have been at the University? Well of course, there has been great institutional change: from a ‘Department of Economics’, as the more or less dominant element in a ‘Faculty of Economics’; to a numerically less important Department, in a Faculty that was expanding in areas of business studies; to a mere ‘Discipline’, within a ‘School of Economics & Political Science’, in turn, within a ‘Faculty of Economics and Business’, dominated by business disciplines; to, finally, since 1/1/11, its current position as a School within a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The move of Economics to a new humanities and social sciences faculty was contentious at the time (with both staff and alumni); but there is no question that it has been an improvement in the position of Economics, from an intellectual point
of view. Economics is a fundamental social science discipline, with a wide-ranging remit in terms of the issues and problems with which it must engage. It is not a mere ancillary element of business studies, although certainly important for that field. What are your best memories of your time working at the University? I arrived at the University at the beginning of 1982, as a PhD student of the late Peter Groenewegen. So when I retired in July last year, I had been here for more than 37 years. I became a fulltime member of the lecturing staff from the beginning of 1985. I actually first taught university students as a tutor at the University of Melbourne, from 1978 (at the unripe young age of 21), and tutored and lectured a bit while a PhD student; so from that point of view, I have been a university teacher, in one way or another, for 43 years.
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With respect to research, as my CV makes clear, I have been throughout my career, since my first research publications from 1985, almost entirely a solitary researcher, not a collaborator (the loneliness of the long-distance researcher, so to speak). So, when I think of best memories, they don’t involve research, since my intellectual engagements on the research front have been more with colleagues outside the University than within. My best memories are therefore mainly of some of the fine students I had the privilege of teaching, notwithstanding that the best of them were good enough to almost teach themselves. Of course, I will not actually name any of them here, since this would unavoidably be partial and therefore somewhat arbitrary. Anyway, they know who they are.
