Ted Wheelwright would write to the Vice-Chancellor in 1970, calling for an official enquiry into the department. Several of the academic hired by Hogan would end up aligning themselves with Wheelwright including: Debesh Bhattacharya, Gavan Butler, Frank Stilwell and Evan Jones. The issue was heightened when students began to complain that the new Economics I and Economics II courses were overly abstract and poorly taught. This would lead Simkin, in 1971, to requests the possibility of a Radical Economics course from 1973. This animosity was compounded when Paul Samuelson, arguably among the most influential economists of the period, came to lecture in Sydney. Samuelson’s lecture was met with much hostility, emptying most of the lecture theatre. As a response, a radical economics conference was organised by three students in 1973— Steve Keen, Richard Fields and Greg Cough. A large scale student and staff coalition would develop when the Philosophy Department decided to strike over the desire to teach a course in feminist and (in the previous year) a course dedicated to Marxist philosophy. The students in Economics I (being taught by Stilwell) voted to support the strike, emerging in the ‘day of protest’ on 25 July 1973 attended by 200 students. The students held a meeting, determining that they wanted a ‘political economy’ course, combining a range of insights from Heterodox economic thought. This led to Pat Mills, a reader in the department of accounting, to set up an official enquiry. Mills found that the establishment of a Department of Political Economy would be the best solution, given that the economics department were unwilling to facilitate the changes to course content suggested by staff and students. The Faculty of economics resolved to endorse the Mills committee findings on 19 April 1974. Joan Robinson would come to speak in April 1975 at the Wallace Lecture Theatre in favour of the political economy movement. Malcolm Turnbull would emerge in 1975 as a key ‘mediator’ of the dispute, in favour of retaining a united economics department, to no avail. The Students’ Representative Council (SRC) in 1976, under the presidency of law student David Patch, would support the political economy push. The political economy conference of 1976 would attract 1500 people from all over Australia, largely fuelled by the Whitlam dismissal. In 1982/3 there was some fear that the Economics I(P) and possible Economics II(P) courses would be lost due to opinions emerging from the Vice-Chancellor. As a response, the SRC organised a vote on the forced merger, in which eighty per cent voted for the maintenance of separate streams.