He began teaching at Stanford in 1946, rising from assistant to associate to full professor.[4]
Tarshis headed the department of economics at Stanford intermittently from 1950 to 1970. He then joined the faculty of Scarborough College, part of the University of Toronto system, and remained there until 1978 as a professor of economics. Until 1988 he was a professor and acting chairman of the department of economics at Glendon College, York University in Ontario. In his later years at Glendon College, he taught Intermediate Macroeconomics from his 1984 book, World Economy in Crisis: Unemployment, Inflation and International Debt.[4]
The most recent textbook witch-hunt provides an edifying example. In August 1947, on the letterhead of an organization calling itself the National Economic Council, Inc., a man named Merwin K. Hart wrote to every member of the boards of trustees of colleges using Elements of Economics, an economic text written by Professor Lorie Tarshis of Stanford University. An enclosed review denounced the book for its exposition of the doctrines of Lord Keynes and identified Keynseianism as a form of Marxism. Hart's letter had an immediate effect. Organizations of small businessmen passed resolutions in his support. Trusettes and alumni wrote outraged letters to college presidents. Yet who was Merwin K. Hart? His record had been long known to students of the American proto-fascist demimonde... Fortunately enough college presidents knew Hart's record to stand up courageously to the uproar... The American Economic Association eventually appointed a special committee to deal with the attacks on the Tarshis book and on other economic texts.[5]
