Oct 16th 2014, 11:00 by C.R. | CAMBRIDGE

FEW unversity curriculums are as controversial as economics. Since the financial crisis, various student groups all over the world, from the Post-Crash Economics Society at Manchester University to the International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics, have challenged the way the subject is taught by professors, believing it too beholden to free-market orthodoxy. Earlier this year, the movement appeared to be gaining strength among both staff and students in Britain and abroad. Many universities had plans to revise their courses. However, the campaign suffered a big blow in April when Manchester University’s planned “Bubbles, Panics and Crashes” course, embracing the reformers’ zeitgeist, was unexpectedly cancelled. Reportedly, resistance to curriculum reform also hardened simultaneously at many other universities in Britain and America.

A series of lectures about the future of economics-curriculum reform, hosted last week by the Cambridge Society for Economic Pluralism, a student group, hoped to breathe some new life into the debate. Speakers talked about the aims behind the movement, as well as ongoing attempts to devise a new curriculum, such as the CORE Project, an initiative lead by Wendy Carlin at University College London.

Generally speaking, the critics say that there are three main things wrong with how economics is currently taught. First, the subject has been driven too much by neo-classical ideology, to the exclusion of other interpretations of the dismal science. Heterodox views should be taught alongside orthodoxy, the critics protest. Second, conventional teaching has led to economics becoming more mathematical over the past 30 years or so, which has further narrowed the range of interpretations that students are exposed to. Third, this statistical focus on theories such as the efficient-markets hypothesis meant that the economics profession did not see the last financial crisis coming, or have any answers to it when it hit. They suggest that more emphasis is needed on less statistically-driven areas of the discipline, such as economic history and psychology, as well as the economics of financial crises and banking panics.

On the other hand, those implacably opposed to the reform movement say the changes only seek to replace one ideology with another based upon heterodox ideas. Perhaps more sensibly, many academic economists have suggested that the critics of the current curricula are missing the point. In order truly to understand the merits and flaws of a method you are attempting to criticise, they say, you need to study it in detail in the first place. Many point out that John Maynard Keynes, an economist whose career is marked by a healthy scepticism of statistical approaches to the discipline, originally studied mathematics and not economics as an undergraduate in Cambridge. And in any case, even if the economics of academia is too theoretical in nature, should not university economics departments be the place where work of this nature is thrashed out?

After sitting through the presentations, many in the audience left feeling that there could be another use for the reformers’ zeal. Alternative curricula, such as the CORE project, emphasise the use of real-life data, case studies, and the role of institutions in economic change. Perhaps such an approach would be better suited to economics courses that are taught in business schools, where short courses in the subject are currently dominated by simplistic theory taken from survey textbooks rather than the intricacies of practical applications. As the point of business and management courses is ultimately to apply what is learnt inside the classroom outside of it, a real-world approach to the study of economics on an MBA programme could add serious value to such qualifications. But whether business-school professors will be more easily convinced than academic economists that such reforms are needed is another question altogether.