On Laurence Moss: Unafraid to Say the Emperor Has No Clothes

On a Thursday evening in late 1990, a man carrying what looked like a giant book walked in the room reserved for the Kress Seminar at the Economics Department of Harvard University and made his way to the podium. He placed his heavy load on the table, opened the giant book, took out from it many regular-looking books, and said, "I have visual footnotes for you." Then every time he cited an author, he raised one of the books, showed us the cover, told us something about it, and then quoted from it. That was the first time I saw Laurence Moss and, as I came to know him, I got used to expecting the colorful gestures with which Larry placed his signature on whatever he did. This first encounter with Larry was years before I knew that he took showmanship seriously enough to make use of it in his classrooms as part of his strategy to expel boredom. My following notes on Larry are not intended to express my sense of loss, especially when it cannot be compared with the grief that his mother, his wife Widdy, and his son Joshua must feel. Larry was gifted with a high level of energy. His absence naturally strikes more severely those to whom he was closest. Yet, since Widdy notified me of Larry's passing, I have found it difficult to pull my thoughts of him away from his personality and think about his scholarship. I will therefore leave that task to Larry's esteemed colleagues at Babson, who are more familiar with the chronology of his broad intellectual interests and contributions to our understanding of economic ideas. Instead, I would like to share my impressions of his personality, not because I know his personal side better than his professional, but because his personality was rare. Someone who did not know Larry personally and observed him express his views in public gatherings might have formed a wrong opinion of who he really was. Larry was the kind who would boldly demonstrate great disapproval of you in your face, but say great things about you behind your back. Despite the battles that were raging in 1993-1994 at Babson's faculty senate, which prompted Larry to refer to Babson as looking more like "Beirut rather than a community," I never heard him say one negative remark about a colleague or group of colleagues with whom he had publicly engaged in a non-mild-mannered discourse. On the contrary, he only had words of praise for them in their absence. Larry felt that Babson had made him a tenured professor to enable him to speak his mind. So he did. "Why else would they tenure me," he told me once after a row he had at a faculty senate meeting. He believed it was his duty to have honest discussions about contentious matters, discussions that reveal true positions, not concealed ones. He believed that it is immoral to flatter someone or be silent in his presence and later cut his throat in his absence. I cannot be the judge of how well this moral principle served him in his life on campus. Yet, at crucial moments his colleagues acknowledged his contributions to the college. In 1993, the faculty senate gave him a prolonged standing ovation when US News and World Report published a special article on his classroom performance in its college ranking issue, when Babson was ranked number one among undergraduate business programs. Larry's feelings were mutual. He told me after that meeting: "That was one of the greatest moments in my life." Not only was Larry proud to have spent most of his professional life at Babson, but also there is no doubt in my mind that Larry had great respect and appreciation for many of his colleagues. "Each one of us has found some way to apply our talents to business education," he once said in reference to one with an extraordinary intellectual background that seemed to be remotely related to business. It may seem paradoxical that while Larry practiced magic, he was outraged by deceit, whether in the form of self-deception or deception of others. …