More than two decades after leaving graduate school, I still feel like a student of Professor Buchanan’s.1 When I see him, I now call him Jim, but at the same time I think of him as Professor Buchanan, the person who, to use modern economic jargon, gave me the human capital to succeed as an academic economist.2 Of course, because so many people have learned so much from his writing, in one sense
... [Show full abstract] there are a huge number of Buchanan students. His ideas have changed the way the profession thinks in fundamental ways, and many people whose main contact with Jim has been through reading his written work can legitimately call themselves Buchanan students. But considered more narrowly, only a privileged few (relatively speaking) have been Buchanan’s classroom students, and I am one of them. This essay reminisces about some of the things I learned from Professor Buchanan in addition to economics. I will discuss not what he taught, but how he taught. His ideas can be found in his writing, but Buchanan’s teaching methods have been revealed to a smaller group. I must confess that Professor Buchanan’s teachng methods have had a huge influence on me, and for more than two decades I have taught my graduate students by trying to emulate the type of instrucion I received from Professor Buchanan in the early 1970s