This week marks five years since the passing of Dr. Walter E. Williams. He had the elegance to die, at 84, minutes after teaching the last class of the semester — and the wisdom to go before he had to grade finals.
Search for “Walter Williams” on The Daily Economy website, and you will find numerous tributes to Dr. Williams and his towering intellect. We mark the solemn milestone with humor and encouragement he offered to his students, inviting you to explore (or revisit) the treasure trove of his syndicated columns, articles, books, speeches, and media appearances.
The following is a selection of AIER staff’s personal memories of Dr. Williams and the graduate microeconomics classes he taught at George Mason University.
David Hebert, PhD, Senior Research Fellow
My relationship with Walter was unique in two ways. First, I was his successor (after Pete Boettke) in teaching “Economics for the Citizen,” a survey course for non-majors that Williams had designed himself. He humored my hundreds of questions, mentoring me patiently and quietly. When I later became department chair at Aquinas College, we modeled the intro course after it, right down to the name. I also have a tattoo of a graph from his course, which he hand drew for me to take to the tattoo parlor. It has deep meaning for my career (even profiled in Troy University’s student newspaper while I was on faculty there).
Walter’s passion for teaching was obvious. He used to state that, “on the day I die, I’d like to have taught a class.” Walter got his wish, passing about an hour after he taught his microeconomics class. There couldn’t be a more perfect ending for such a great man.
William J. Luther, PhD, Director, Sound Money Project
Walter Williams had an unrelenting smile. He would look you dead in the eye, explain precisely why you were wrong, and smile the whole way through. But apparently it wasn’t always that way. Early in his career, Williams received a call from Milton Friedman, who had seen him on TV. As Williams recounted in my first-year Microeconomic Theory course at George Mason University, Friedman said: “You were great, Walter. But you need to smile more.” It seems he took the advice.
Paul Mueller, PhD, Senior Research Fellow
Walter Williams believed that to understand the world, you had to get basic economic theory right. His microeconomics class was not fancy or sophisticated in terms of equations, data modeling, or econometrics. But it was rigorous and focused on understanding price theory. Dr. Williams himself was a warm, humorous, and at times eccentric, instructor. He was fiercely independent, yet he made time for students with questions or who were genuinely struggling. He was also uncompromising in his economic ideals and would apply them relentlessly, in the classroom and in print. The world, and the economics profession, are poorer without him.
Thomas Savidge, Research Fellow
For Dr. Williams, correct explanations were concise and clear. Anyone who tried to outsmart Williams with jargon-loaded filibusters was quickly humbled. In the few instances where Williams was asked about a subject that he wasn’t familiar with, he’d say “Let me get back to you on that.” It was a breadth of fresh air from my studies of those in government, where one has strong incentives to “fake it ‘til you make it.”
In my research and policy work now, I often introduce folks to the ideas which I learned in Williams’s ECON 811. To be an effective ambassador of these ideas, I rely on Williams’s advice: focus on the fundamentals, use humor, and have confidence in yourself and the knowledge you seek to impart.
Julia Cartwright, PhD, Senior Research Fellow
Dr. Williams taught my first microeconomics course in graduate school, and truly honed my thinking and taught me how to think like an economist. He taught us not just what economists know, but, much more importantly, how economists reason. He was never impressed by jargon or a wall of equations; he wanted clear, elegant, precise explanations of how the world works through an economic lens. Many of us who arrived with a more mainstream or mathematics-heavy background (myself included) found his approach uniquely challenging but invigorating. He pushed us to rely on logic and economic theory to explain phenomena rather than simply compute them. His emphasis on microeconomics as price theory gave us a framework we could apply to almost any real-world situation.
Dr. Williams shaped my thinking as an economist, and modeled a rare blend of intellectual rigor and human generosity. I remain deeply grateful to have been his student.
Nikolai Wenzel, PhD, Senior Research Fellow
Walter Williams taught microeconomics at 7 am. And he terrified me. When he handed back our midterms, he asked, “Who’s Wenzel?” I raised my hand. “I had to grade this twice,” he said, pausing. “Because nobody gets a perfect score, except me and God.” He’d even put one of his cheeky gold star stickers on the blue book. I still have it.
There are many more outrageous stories — his wife improbably going out on a date, fat cigar-smoking men, sexy secretaries and compensating differentials, almost starting a race riot in the Jim Crow South. But we learned our price theory. May I be half the teacher he was. May all your gains be marginal. Suffer no fools.
In Fond Remembrance
Walter E. Williams often quipped that the “E.” in his name “stands for ‘Excellence’.” Anyone who knew him knew that was true. We hope to carry Walter’s legacy forward by cherishing the memories we had of his class and using the lessons we learned as his students.
