University of East Africa Conferences on Public Policy: II. East African Federation

1964 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-122
Author(s):  
Ronald Watts

This was the second in a series of three conferences on public policy, organised by the University of East Africa and financed by the Ford Foundation, whose aim is to bring together policy-makers and academics for discussions on major public issues.In attendance were delegations, of at least a dozen each, from Uganda, Kenya, and Tanganyika, consisting mainly of Cabinet Ministers, parliamentary secretaries, other M.P.s, and civil servants, as well as representatives of public corporations, political parties, and trade unions. Small delegations from Ethiopia, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Southern Rhodesia, and Zanzibar were also invited. A group of 10 ‘visiting specialists’ from overseas with experience of federal systems and problems elsewhere were invited to take part. Among these were six economists: Ursula Hicks and Arthur Hazlewood from Oxford, Pitamber Pant of the Indian Planning Commission, Vladimir Kollontai from Moscow, Jan Auerhan from Prague, and Benton Massell (who was unable to attend but contributed a paper) from the United States. The others were a lawyer, S. A. de Smith from the London School of Economics, and three political scientists, Arthur MacMahon of Columbia University, A. H. Birch from Hull University, and myself. A group of a dozen ‘local specialists’ drawn mainly from E.A.C.S.O. and from the economists, lawyers, and political scientists at the University Colleges in East Africa also presented papers and played a significant role in the discussions. The total number of participants, including 22 observers, amounted to over 90.

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-41
Author(s):  
Keith Tribe

The ‘modern university’—research-based, in which teaching and research are pursued by academic specialists organised departmentally—was created in the United States in the later nineteenth century in a productive misunderstanding of the organisation of knowledge and teaching in contemporary German universities. While the latter enjoyed international recognition, academic careers remained in thrall to an apprenticeship structure in which senior staff represented their entire discipline, supported by their juniors. The American structure, fostered by endowments and grants, presumed that departments would be composed of specialists who advanced their careers by developing their specialism. This was decisive for the disciplinary development of universities around the world. In London, the university was a federal, administrative body whose degree courses could be followed both within Britain and in the wider Empire. As a component part of this structure, the London School of Economics shared in this reach, and so came to dominate the teaching of the social sciences in Britain and the Empire.


2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-337
Author(s):  
SHERRY DAVIS KASPER

From the 1920s to the 1980s, Dr. Eveline Mabel Burns made significant contributions to the discipline of economics. During her career, she taught at world-class universities, including the London School of Economics and Columbia University. She published in the fields of labor economics, general economic theory, economic forecasting, methodology, and social security in leading economic journals. In the 1930s, she began her work in establishing the social security system in the United States. Yet, despite this multitude of accomplishments, the work of Eveline Mabel Burns is barely discernible in accounts of the evolution of twentieth-century economics. This essay remedies that neglect by explicating her career and economics. First, it describes her early years as an economist as she determined the ultimate course of her professional career. Second, it outlines the hybrid institutional method of analysis she used. Third, it describes how she made use of this methodology in her work on social security. Finally, it concludes with an interpretation of her neglect in twentieth-century economics that highlights her gender and her use of institutional methods of analysis.


2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1278-1281

Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University and NBER reviews “Reforming U.S. Financial Markets: Reflections before and beyond Dodd-Frank” by Randall S. Kroszner and Robert J. Shiller. The EconLit abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Two papers and discussions, presented at the fifth Alvin Hansen Symposium on Public Policy held at Harvard University in April 2009, explore what the United States should do to prevent a repeat of the recent financial crisis and the economic costs it has imposed. Papers discuss democratizing and humanizing finance (Robert J. Shiller) and making markets more robust (Randall S. Kroszner). Kroszner is Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics in the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. Shiller is Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University. Index.”


Author(s):  
Adam Kuper

Isaac Schapera (1905–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, spent the second half of his long life in London but remained very much a South African. His parents immigrated to South Africa at the turn of the century from what is now Belarus, and settled in Garies, a small town in the semi-desert district of Little Namaqualand, in the Northern Cape. As an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, Schapera was introduced to ‘British social anthropology’ by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, one of the founding fathers of the discipline, the other being Bronislaw Malinowski. He then became one of the first members of Malinowski’s post-graduate seminar at the London School of Economics. Towards the end of his career, Schapera preferred to describe himself as an ethnographer rather than as an anthropologist. His research in the 1930s and 1940s was distinguished by a concern with ‘social change’, a focus endorsed in South Africa by Malinowski in London.


Author(s):  
Bryan S. Turner

Edward Shils’ Portraits offers various intellectual biographies of major figures that played a large role in his life, mainly at the University of Chicago. The list is diverse including economists, sociologists, natural scientists, and historians of the ancient world. The diversity illustrates the breadth of Shils’ academic work. The famous Committee for Social Thought was a key institution in Shils’ intellectual development and, while Portraits can be read as a history of the University of Chicago during the twentieth century, Shils was a trans-Atlantic intellectual with close connections to Peterhouse College Cambridge and the London School of Economics. Portraits is a celebration of the Chicago tradition created by Robert Maynard Hutchins University President (1929-1945) for the in-depth study of ‘great books’, but Shils concludes with a nostalgic reflection on the end of the ‘age of books’. The narrative is haunted by the figure of Max Weber, whose rationalization thesis has been borne out with the rise of the bureaucratic corporate university and the narrow specialization of research.


2021 ◽  
pp. 333-368
Author(s):  
Keith Tribe

Lionel Robbins was appointed head of the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1929 following the sudden death of Allyn Young, the incumbent professor. Young had not made any significant alteration to the teaching at LSE, but from the very first Robbins set about reorganising the profile of economics teaching. The framework within which he did this was one of a ‘science’ based upon ‘economic principles’, and in 1932 his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science provided the methodological template for his project. This work appears to owe a great deal to Austrian economics, but it can be demonstrated that this was indirect, chiefly through the work of Wicksteed and Wicksell, hence reflecting economics where it had stood in the 1880s. Nonetheless, Robbins was successful in repackaging this work, and his Essay stimulated the development of discussions of economic method. In addition, Robbins’s lectures provided the template for the textbook literature of the 1950s, cementing the influence of the LSE on the training of young economists. However, this training remained at the undergraduate level for the most part due to the lack of labour market demand for economists in Britain; in the United States, by contrast, graduate teaching became the motor through which American economics came to dominate the international teaching of economics.


2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 1850054 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M Stern

Overview of the Special Issue prepared under the direction of Guest Editor Robert Stern. Robert M. Stern, the Guest Editor of this special issue of the Global Economy Journal, is Professor of Economics and Public Policy (Emeritus) in the Department of Economics and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1958. He was a Fulbright scholar in the Netherlands in 1958-59, taught at Columbia University for two years, and joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1961. He has been an active contributor to international economic research and policy for more than four decades. He has published numerous papers and books on a wide variety of topics, including international commodity problems, the determinants of comparative advantage, price behavior in international trade, balance-of-payments policies, the computer modeling of international trade and trade policies, trade and labor standards, and services liberalization. He has collaborated with Alan Deardorff (University of Michigan) since the early 1970s and with Drusilla Brown (Tufts University) since the mid-1980s in developing the Michigan Model of World Production and Trade. He is currently working with Drusilla Brown and Kozo Kiyota (Yokohama National University) on the computational modeling and analysis of preferential and multilateral trade negotiations, and issues relating to the scope of the WTO and concepts of fairness in the global trading system with Andrew Brown.


2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-131

John W. Budd of the Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies, University of Minnesota reviews “Trade Unions in Western Europe: Hard Times, Hard Choices”, by Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick and Richard Hyman. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores the challenges facing trade unions and their responses in ten west European countries—Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy. Discusses varieties of industrial relations and trade unionism; challenges and responses; renewing power resources—recruitment, representation, and mobilization; restructuring trade unionism—mergers and organizational redesign; bargaining in adversity—decentralization, social partnership, and the crisis; unions and politics—parties, alliances, and the battle of ideas; beyond national boundaries—unions, Europe, and the world; and reconciling strategy and democracy. Gumbrell-McCormick is Senior Lecturer in Management at Birkbeck College, University of London. Hyman is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.”


1990 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-19
Author(s):  
William D. Coplin

Undergraduates for a Better Education (UBE) is an official student organization at Syracuse University which grew out of an informal study group that started in the fall of 1986. The purpose of this article is not just to tell you about this organization but to exhort you to try a similar activity on your campus. Working for UBE provides students with the opportunity to develop skills and test theories about politics in a policy area that is very important to them. And even if you don't buy the proposal on pedagogical grounds, you certainly can appreciate the justness of UBE's cause —to pressure administrators and fellow faculty to give higher priority to teaching. However, you may want to think twice before embarking on this road especially if you are not a tenured full professor.A study group composed of seven students in my freshman course, PAF 101: Introduction to the Analysis of Public Policy, met in the fall of 1986 to discuss public policy issues. From this small number of students, a highly visible student organization emerged with representation from across the university. The organization has had an impact at Syracuse University and has held two national conferences attended by twenty different schools from across the United States. As its faculty advisor, I played a major role in its creation but at this time play a smaller role. (I talk or meet with officers about once a week and attend a meeting once a semester.) Michael K. O'Leary, a political science professor, has served in an advisory role on several projects. Other professors have offered private support but kept a public distance from the organization.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-285
Author(s):  
Arvind Rajagopal

Werner Sollors is one of the first scholars of American literature to focus on African American literature before it was thought to constitute a canon in the academy. Unlike many other scholars who shared his focus, he completed his education in postwar Germany. The title of his doctoral dissertation on LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), completed at the Free University of Berlin in 1975, has a still-contemporary ring: “The Quest for a ‘Populist Modernism.’” He taught at Columbia University, received a Guggenheim fellowship, and spent the bulk of his career in the United States. In this interview he discusses his intellectual formation and offers reflections on the development of his field, the evolving institutional culture of the university, and 1970s-era multiculturalism.


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