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Friedrich Hayek's graduate student Arthur Lewis was the first black man to win a Nobel Prize in an area other than the Peace Prize.
"I got into the history of the world economy because Friedrich Hayek, then Acting Chairman of the LSE Dept of Economics suggested that I teach a course on âwhat happened between the warsâ to give concreteness to the massive doses of trade cycle theory which then dominated ..
.. the curriculum. I replied to Hayek that I did not know what happened between the wars; to which he replied that the best way of learning a subject was to teach it." -- Arthur Lewis https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1979/lewis/biographical/
"It was the throng of Asian and African students at Manchester that set me lecturing systematically on development economics from about 1950, following Hayekâs rule that the way to learn is to teach." -- Arthur Lewis
âMarvellous intellectual feastsâ: Arthur Lewis -- The LSE Years, 1933â48 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9781137366436_2
Arthur Lewis at LSE â one of our best teachers https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2015/01/23/arthur-lewis-at-lse-one-of-our-best-teachers/
Hayek in LSE documents described Arthur Lewis as "one of our best teachersâ and gave Lewis a heavy course load when Hayek led the joint LSE-Cambridge economics department at Cambridge University during the war.
Film -- "The Legacy of Arthur Lewis" http://www.lse.ac.uk/Research/lse-festival-research-competition-2020/assets/entries/EX045
W. Arthur Lewis -- wikipedia -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Arthur_Lewis
In 1938, Lewis was appointed to a one-year teaching appointment in the Econ Department at the LSE which was extended for four years, and so despite Director Beveridge's ambivalence about the appointment, Lewis became LSEâs first black faculty member.
Lewis's greatest personal debt was to the Professor of Commerce, Arnold Plant. âHe was my mentor and without his word at crucial points I would have neither received the scholarship nor the assistant lectureship.â
Lewis completed his Dissertation, "The economics of loyalty contracts" in 1940 under the supervision of Arnold Plant. According to Hayek, when a dissertation was done at the LSE, the whole of the senior faculty was involved with the dissertation.
Hayek recalls Arthur Lewis as for a time one of the dominant participants in the Robbins-Hayek faculty-student seminar.
Socialist & progressive faculty members & administrators at the LSE wanted to keep Arthur Lewis out of the classroom bc he was black. Liberals Hayek & Robbins made Lewis the first black instructor at the LSE & Hayek turned over much of the curriculum to Lewis in the early 1940s.
Lewis, like all of the graduate students/junior faculty at the LSE was developed as a scholar by the whole senior faculty at the LSE, principally in the Robbins-Hayek seminar. Strictly speaking, Lewis was Arnold Plant's student. Plant was his mentor & led his 1940 dissertation.
*W. Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics* https://www.amazon.com/Arthur-Lewis-Birth-Development-Economics/dp/0691121419
Arthur Lewis -- A Lasting Legacy
Arthur Lewis on Development Economics
*The Principles Of Economic Planning* by W. Arthur Lewis https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Principles_of_Economic_Planning.html?id=kCkqJjcGDk0C&source=kp_book_description
Hayek's best friend economist Fritz Machlup was one of the faculty members who brought Lewis on to the economics faculty at Princeton University, making Lewis the first full professor of African descent on the Princeton faculty.
