Whose fault? Q&A in McGuinn. Photograph: Suzanne Camarata

Such is the appetite, in these jittery times, for economic analysis that a forum on the U.S. financial crisis, held October 23, filled McGuinn 121 well beyond its capacity of 256, with students sitting in the aisles and standing at the back of the room. Even the event’s co-organizer, Rob Celin ’11, of Boston College’s undergraduate government (UGBC), said he was “shocked” by the size of the crowd.

In telephone interviews earlier, Celin and co-organizer Justin Pike ’11 explained that the event was conceived for students to air concerns over the troubled economy and obtain solid information from Boston College social scientists. The pair had heard classmates worrying aloud about the present (How much will my family lose in the market? Will I have to leave school?) as well as the future (“not just careers,” Celin said, “but what getting a loan is going to be like 10 years from now”).

Yet on the evening of the forum, the crowd seemed nearly festive. As they entered, audience members—mostly economics and business majors, according to a show of hands—laughed and joked with one another and called across the room to friends. One attendee, in a knit alpaca cap with long, floppy earflaps, strode in with a Razor scooter tucked beneath an arm. When it came time for students to query the panel, their questions touched more on economic theory—and, in a few cases, ideology—than on financial worries.

Sponsored by UGBC, the Carroll School of Management, and the College of Arts & Sciences, the forum opened with remarks from the panelists. Finance professor Philip Strahan covered the housing market’s collapse, the resulting mortgage defaults, and the unwillingness of creditors to loan more money. Robert Murphy, an economist, praised the federal bailout-in-progress as “relevant,” if somewhat improvised. Progress toward rescuing the markets had been “extraordinary” for a crisis so new, he said, but aid to homeowners lagged. Peter Ireland, also an economist, forecast recession through the second quarter of 2009, but noted that substantial recoveries have followed recessions in the past. In “three years, five years, 10 years, we’re all going to get where we want to be,” he said.

Eventually the panel took audience questions: Is stock market performance a good measure of economic performance? What are the global ramifications of the financial crisis? Did malfeasance by bond rating agencies help create the “toxic debt”?

A young man asked heatedly, and to loud, though somewhat scattered, applause, whether one should view the government bailout “as an attack on the fundamental principles of capitalism.” Murphy reassured the questioner that the government would sell off its stake in banks as soon as the economy recovered. “But,” he admitted, “we will see some rethinking of the regulatory structure” to ward off future crises. Calling himself “a little more sympathetic to [the] question,” Strahan voiced concern that under tighter regulations “capitalism may be less dynamic for a while,” and recovery slowed.

Another questioner pressed the issue: If the crisis was a failure of markets and not of government, why was the government spending so much to bail the markets out? The fourth panelist, Kay Schlozman, a political scientist, responded, “There will be a lot of collateral damage if you just let markets do their thing.” She raised the specter of abandoned neighborhoods, downwardly spiraling property values, and accelerating crime rates. To which Strahan added, “Government is doing what governments do: trying to put out a fire.”

After another question or two, the forum ended, and students filed out noisily, appearing no less cheerful than when they had entered. Hanging back, Rob Celin confessed to surprise that his peers’ questions had been so, well, academic. “No one,” he speculated, “wants to believe that, after you invest so much in your education, everything you worked for isn’t going to be there.” Indeed, in a survey taken that week at 49 colleges, 94 percent of undergraduates termed the economy in bad shape, but 80 percent were confident that they personally would land a job after graduation.

David Reich is a writer in the Boston area.

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