Advancing the Austrian Tradition at Grove City

In 1956, J. Howard Pew hired Hans Sennholz, the young protégé of the Dean of Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises, to head the economics department at Grove City College. Under his direction, Grove City College became the world’s leading undergraduate institution for the study of Austrian economics. In the early 1960s, Sennholz attempted the next step in advancing the Austrian school. He brought together leading Austrian economists, including Mises and Murray Rothbard, to develop a graduate school in Austrian economics. Despite J. Howard Pew’s initial interest, the program failed to come to fruition. Sennholz’s initiative, however, would prove to be a harbinger of things to come.

Five years after Mises died in 1973, his widow, Margit von Mises, sought out their friend, Hans Sennholz, to make GCC permanent home to his papers and library. Sennholz gratefully accepted custody of the papers and hoped that Mises’s library would wind up at a graduate program where students would be capable of benefiting from it. Since 1978, the 20,000 page Mises Archive at GCC has already been the source of four books of his previously unpublished manuscripts. At the end of this year, the Mises Archive will be fully digitized. In short order next year, scholars around the world will be able access its pages from anywhere in the world.  

After 36 years as chairman of the department of economics at the college, Sennholz retired in 1992. Under the stewardship of John Moore, president of GCC from 1996-2003, the Austrian approach to economics was reinvigorated. Moore hired Jeff Herbener in 1997 to head the economics program and then Shawn Ritenour in 2001. Under the current president, Paul McNulty, Caleb Fuller was hired to round out the economics faculty in 2017. Fuller studied under Herbener and Ritenour, graduating from GCC with a B.A. in economics in 2013 and earning his Ph.D. in economics at George Mason University in 2017. With his addition, the economics faculty was restored to fully Austrian.

The economics department is in the process of taking the next step in realizing Sennholz’s dream. In the fall of 2025, GCC will launch a Master of Arts in Economics. The program will be thoroughly Austrian in its curriculum and faculty. Seven adjunct faculty will join with the three members of the economics department to teach the courses. Its success is the result of the tremendous growth of the community of scholars in Austrian economics since Sennholz’s attempt in the 1960s. The GCC economics faculty has played its part in building this community.