Writing a course description is hard. In Irish universities ( and elsewhere), the individual lecturer must hew to a course description designed by either the head of department, or a committee of senior colleagues. The writer of this course description must contend with a host of issues; what concepts are to be included? What should be discarded? At what level should the material challenge the students? All the while, the writer must consider those who came before her in writing the course description, and those who will come after. The outcome of this process is, naturally, a course shaped around a textbook.In economics, one finds young professors teaching from the textbooks they squinted over not so long ago, replaying elements of their favorite lectures. Young professors want to stick rigourously to the course description, given to them by the Head of Department, because they wish to be good colleagues, not make any waves, and not make any presumptions with the students, who might damage their teaching evaluations. In Irish universities, changing the content of the course by more than 25% requires approval at the faculty level. The young professors must hew to the textbooks for guidance, because the course description is deliberately light on specifics. Often only keywords are present for guidance.Because most textbooks are written from similar methodological standpoints, (E.g. in macroeconomics: Barro and Sala-i Martin 2003, Blanchard 2005, Abel et al. 2007, DeLong 2002), the course content is, perforce, of a similar orientation. The course in macroeconomics, say, begins from the production function, adds the marginal conditions for productivities of capital and labour, and continues on to build a micro-founded macroeconomic model, where all the individual markets are in equilibrium, all the consumers maximize their consumption and saving profiles over time, and business cycles are simply the resultant outcomes of stochastic shocks to technology, labour, capital, and so forth.Teaching exclusively from a neoclassical perspective is distressing for one who tends toward less conventional thought. Say one is a post-Keynesian. If one believes in the inability of unregulated markets to satisfy effective demand, if one does not believe the production function is a reasonable way of modeling economic activity, if one endorses the influences of fundamental uncertainty, asymmetric information, and psychological biases as underpinning economic decisions, then to teach a theory which assumes away these features of reality is contradictory. Here I'm assuming a polar position for the sake of argument: of course one can alloy the textbook with supplementary readings, spend time critiquing the model, or simply disregard the course description, and teach what one wants to. But let's say for the moment the young professor has to choose between rigourously upholding her personal views, or teaching verbatim out of a standard textbook. I should confess at this stage that my personal orientation would be post-Keynesian.In this world, if one's preference is for a non-equilibrium macroeconomics, and one teaches equilibrium macroeconomics, then this activity can be referred to as preference falsification, in the sense of Kuran (1987, 54).Preference falsification can occur in teaching when a personal intellectual compromise takes place with respect to the content of a class being taught. The professor publicly espouses a theory or mode of storytelling whose policy prescriptions are, in some cases, orthogonal to their private and professional views or attitudes.