I shall preface my remarks with a relevant and deserved tribute to the late Professor Wilson Gee of the University of Virginia. Gee was a prophet without honor in his own university, and it is fitting that I pay him tribute here among some men who may have known him. Gee came to Virginia early in the 1920's and, after a dispute with other economists, he split off and established his own department which he called "Rural Social Economics." Almost single-handedly he developed a Ph.D. program which awarded some 20 degrees over a thirty-year span, some of whose recipients remain leading educators and public officials today. Apart from all this and complementary to it, Gee secured external funds, established an institute, published twenty-seven books through its auspices, and forced the state legislature in Virginia to include an annual appropriation for social science research. The latter remains a mighty achievement today; you can imagine the odds against Gee in the 1930's. My reference here to Wilson Gee is not opportunistic or passing. I shall argue that one future for "agricultural economics," as a scholarly subdiscipline worthy of continuing public and private support, and especially in land-grant universities, is provided in the approach that the title of Gee's now-defunct department suggests, "Rural Social Economics." Before getting into my central argument, however, let me clear the air by stating briefly my own views about disciplinary and subdisciplinary classifications. I have never considered these to be of much import, and one of my personal criteria for evaluating an administrative unit is its willingness to discard and forget about "fields" and "areas." I have never been impressed by the departmental chairman or recruiting officer who says that we must fill a vacancy in "labor," in "trade," etc. The various subdisciplines in economics seem to me more or less arbitrary, in any case, and dependent more on accidents in academic history than on anything else. Good economic theory can be taught, and students can be trained to apply it, under a host of rubrics, including many not yet dreamt of in our educational philosophies. Hence, I do not mind very much when new courses are proposed in areas that attract current topical interest, provided only that the economics is rigorous and that the instructor is competently and professionally trained, in attitude as well as in technique. I see no cause for alarm when proposals are made for courses and specializations in such things as "economics of poverty," "ghetto economics," or