The department keeps arguing against bitcoin with these points.
1) Bitcoin is deflationary and it will cause it to fail. (facepalm)
2) Bitcoin is doomed to fail because people hoard it instead of spending it. No Economy exist.(facepalm x2)
3) Nobody uses Bitcoin for anything (Not Mainstream=Not real???) (Facepalm x 1,000,000)
My Goal: Raise Awareness about Bitcoin. Starting with the economics department and then expanding to the whole campus then the whole town.
I see that I'm not alone in stating that your economics department is actually right, but this would be too obvious an answer and surely not what you would like to hear. Probably, it is also too late to mend matters and change anything, but if I were you and had been interested in Bitcoin and all that, I would probably make my thesis on investigating a Ponzy nature of Bitcoin from an economical standpoint (even if you don't believe it to be) or just stick to some particular feature of it that could be interesting for an economist. This would possibly cause much more excitement and agitation in your tutor and the department as whole and also would give you a better understanding of the true nature of Bitcoin
Raising awareness about Bitcoin seems to be a rather strange subject for an economics student...