The Clark medal faced early criticism for being too theoretical and anti-empirical

Evidence

The historian Beatrice Cherrier has drawn our attention to the fact that both AEA prizes, the Clark and Walker medals, faced criticism and challenge in the first decades of their existence. Perhaps unexpectedly, the Clark medal came in for some disparagement as being too narrow, too theoretical, insufficiently elevating empirical work, and not adequately concerned with public policy. The discontent came to a head at the 1958 AEA meeting, where there was a proposal to mint another medal to highlight the empirical and public policy side of economics, to be named the Wesley Clair Mitchell medal. In the executive committee meeting, a motion was proposed to either pair the Clark medal with the new Mitchell medal, or else discontinue the Clark medal altogether. Some of the membership began to chafe at the “all must have prizes” argument, and controversy broke out about the whole idea of having formal prizes of any stripe sponsored by the AEA. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 532