The Murphy Institute, 1980-2005
The story of the Murphy Institute begins with Charles H. Murphy, Sr. (1870-1954) and his family. Operating in South Arkansas and North Louisiana, Mr. Murphy launched family businesses in timber, banking, and oil exploration that were brought together in 1950 
under the leadership of Charles H. Murphy, Jr. to become the Murphy Oil Corporation, a now worldwide oil and gas exploration and production company based in El Dorado, Arkansas.
Founded in memory of Charles H. Murphy, Sr., the Murphy Institute is supported by the endowment of the Tulane Murphy Foundation. Original donors to the Foundation included his widow Bertie W. Murphy and their children and spouses: Johnie W. and Charles H. Murphy, Jr.; Bertie M. and John W. Deming; Caroline M. and Rt. Rev. Christoph Keller; and Theodosia M. and William C. Nolan.
(1920-2002) 
Part two of this story is about Charles H. Murphy, Jr., who served as the Chair and driving force of the Foundation until the early 1990s. Indeed, it was Charles H. Murphy, Jr. who envisioned the Murphy Institute as what it has in part become: an international force in reviving and replenishing “political economy” as Adam Smith first understood it: not just study of interconnections between politics and economics, but a rich interdisciplinary field in which economists, historians, moral philosophers, and political scientists make contributions of shared and equal interest.
Since its founding in 1980, teaching and scholarship have been at the heart of the Murphy Institute. Some 90-120 Tulane students annually enroll in the undergraduate political economy program, making it one of the most popular interdisciplinary majors at the University.
The demanding curriculum of this program includes courses drawn from economics, history, philosophy, and political science; it also requires completion of five ‘core’ political economy courses designed specifically for the major. The strength of the undergraduate program can be measured, in part, by the recognized excellence of its students.
Faculty Programs
Through a variety of faculty programs, the Murphy Institute also supports interdisciplinary research and scholarship at Tulane. Conferences and seminars serve as settings for presentation of new research by Tulane faculty and leading scholars in the United States and abroad. In recent years, visitors have included Amartya Sen (Harvard), John Ferejohn (Stanford), Thomas Haskell (Rice), John Gray (Jesus College, Oxford), Albert O. Hirschman (Institute for Advanced Study), and Gary Becker (Chicago).
The results of such programs can be seen in the steady stream of books and articles that issue from our faculty and from participants in our seminars and conferences. Their impact is also felt in the pages of the Murphy Institute Studies in Political Economy, a series of occasional volumes the Institute co-sponsors with Cambridge University Press. PPE: A Journal of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics is also sponsored by and housed in the Murphy Institute.
In 1990, at the beginning of the Murphy Institute’s second decade at Tulane, new testimony to its value came in the form of a five-year, $630,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant has allowed for continuing development of the Institute by supporting two new faculty positions in international political economy and its existing program of faculty seminars and publications.
Publications
In Spring, 2001, the Murphy Institute launched PPE: A Journal of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics,) which is co-edited by two of our core faculty (Gerald Gaus and Jonathan Riley) and published by Sage Periodicals Press.
Graduates
Since 1984, our majors have included Sean Berkowitz (Tulane College, ‘89), recipient of the William Wallace Peery Medal for Academic Excellence; and four past presidents of the University Associated Student Body: Lorien Smith (Newcomb, ‘88), William Lombard (Tulane College, ‘91), Jill Kaiser (Newcomb,’93), and Lee Samango (Newcomb, ‘95).
Over the course of the last nineteen years, over 450 Tulane and Newcomb undergraduates have received B.A.’s in political economy. Many of them have then gone on to pursue professional degrees in education, law, public policy, business, and medicine at universities such as Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, NYU, Texas, Iowa, Minnesota, Washington&Lee, Stanford, and Tulane.