Biographies
Bios 1963-1964
Since AXP or EQV
or
Bios by them that are living it
Table of Contents
Robert E.
Gallamore is Director of The Transportation Center and Professor of Managerial
Economics and Decision Sciences in the Kellogg School of Management at
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. The Transportation Center was founded in
1954, and has long been recognized as a leader in higher education for
transportation. In addition to its academic programs, the Center sponsors
executive programs, research studies, and policy seminars.
Prior to
joining Northwestern University in August, 2001, Gallamore was on executive loan
from Union Pacific Railroad to the Transportation Technology Center, Inc., in
Pueblo, Colorado. There he was Assistant Vice President, Communications
Technologies and General Manager of the North American Joint Positive Train
Control Program. This partnership of the Association of American
Railroads, the Federal Railroad Administration, and the State of Illinois DOT is
establishing railroad industry interoperability standards and deploying an
operational positive train control system enabling rail passenger train speeds
of up to 110 mph between Chicago and
St. Louis. Before the
industry assignment, Gallamore was General Director, Strategic Analysis for the
Union Pacific Railroad in Omaha and an executive
with UP Corporation in New York City.
Gallamore
has also served in several positions with the federal government. As Deputy
Federal Railroad Administrator under President Jimmy Carter, he led the
Executive Branch development of recommendations for railroad deregulation and
revitalization. In this capacity he was awarded one of the first Senior
Executive Service Awards by President Carter. Earlier, Gallamore was Associate
Administrator for Planning of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration and
System Plan Coordinator with the United States Railway Association (which
established Conrail out of the facilities of the bankrupt Northeast railroads).
After 9/11, Gallamore served on a National Academy of
Sciences panel, “Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism: Transportation
and Distribution Systems,” whose report is included in Making the Nation
Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism.
Subsequently, Gallamore chaired the National Research Council / Transportation
Research Board Committee on Freight Transportation Information Systems Security,
which addressed issues, threats, and research priorities in this difficult area.
A published report was released in autumn, 2003. He currently chairs another NAS
/ TRB panel on hazardous materials transportation research.
Dr.
Gallamore received his A.B. from Wesleyan University with high honors. He earned
an M.A. in Public Administration and a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government
from Harvard University. His dissertation on railroad mergers remains a standard
reference. Among Gallamore's numerous publications is a chapter on railroad
innovation and regulation in the recent book, Essays in Transportation
Economics and Policy: a Handbook in Honor of John R. Meyer, published by the
Brookings Institution (1999).
More than forty years after graduation, few of us have
‘short’ histories.
After somehow managing to complete college in four years,
I taught math and English at the high school level for several years, then
pulled up stakes and sailed across the Atlantic where I hitchhiked extensively
around northern Europe for six adventure-filled months. Back in the States, I
took a position in the Administration at Columbia University Teachers College - this lasted for
several wonderfully rewarding years. Then, looking for new horizons, I enrolled
at Northeastern University in Boston where I completed a Masters program in Public
Accounting. Following graduation in 1970, I migrated to San
Francisco where I have resided ever since. My first job in
San Francisco was grunt auditing work for Arthur Anderson (boring).
Called to the carpet for ‘levity on the job’ (how else was I to survive!), I
soon moved on to Golden Gate University where I worked for the next ten years as
the Comptroller.
Since childhood I had been afflicted with a severe heart
problem of unknown origins and dimensions. In the seventies and early eighties,
I was hospitalized a number of times for over a month at a time with bacterial
infections in my damaged aortic valve, but miraculously managed to survive. In
1983, the doctors decided that I needed replacement parts, so I was put through
the first of two major open-heart surgeries to repair damage to my aorta,
severely weakened by a rare congenital arterial disease, and to replace my
by-now severely damaged aortic valve. At the time of the first surgery, I was
the Chief Financial Officer for a small national San
Francisco-based architectural landscape firm. The doctors, declaring
that I would not live long if I were employed in such a stressful environment,
encouraged me to resign and enter the ranks of the disabled. In truth, the
doctors did not hold out much hope that I would survive for long at all. I
managed to beat the odds and here I am, more than twenty years later, with
custom-built replacement parts installed in 2001, continuing to enjoy my life
and my many wonderful friends.
For the past twenty-four plus years I have been in a
domestic partnership with the delightful Robert Brown – my dear friend, my rock.
At our home in San Francisco we have, over the
years, had the pleasure of playing host to a continuing stream of visitors from
all over the world. We have crammed our lives with frequent trips to visit
friends and relatives throughout the United States and also frequently traveled
abroad where we have been lucky to form close friendships in many intriguing
corners of the world. When at home, I am frequently found bidding and playing my
heart out at a duplicate bridge game somewhere in northern California – I am
proud to have been measurably successful in such competition since my forced
retirement.
I have been a very lucky man – and my experiences at
Wesleyan, particularly EQV, were a memorable kick-off on this incredible
journey.
While at Wesleyan I planned to be a lawyer and was
accepted to Columbia Law. By graduation (1963),
studying the law was the last thing I wanted to do, but New
York was too attractive to miss (Dan Snyder and Tom McKnight were my
roommates for a while). After taking art history classes at
Columbia that summer, I decided to pursue a degree there, (would
occasionally have lunch with Steve Buttner and Steve Butts, and see Brian Kazlov).
Earned my MA (l965) and PhD (l972), with a dissertation on the French 19th
century painter, Gustave Moreau. While working on the doctorate, spent two years
in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship.
My first full-time job was at UCLA where I taught 19th
and 20th century art, and my research interests were French academic and
official painting, and late 19th century Symbolism. (Would occasionally see or
hear from Don Walz, Dave Fisher and Rick Tuttle.)During this period I organized
an exhibition on Moreau at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. My happiest achievement
was marrying Robin Reiser after a whirlwind romance, and we recently celebrated
our 35th anniversary.
Became a faculty member in the art department at
California State University, San Bernardino in 1976, which is my academic home.
Earned tenure there, and after about seven years, took what was a part-time
position as Dean of Graduate Studies. Administrative then occupied me for the
next ten or so years, where the part-time job became full-time, and the areas of
Research and Faculty Development were added to my responsibilities. I enjoyed
the contacts across the campus and taking a broader view of the educational
process than was possible as a departmental professor, and became active in
state and national graduate associations. This led to invitations to serve on
the Boards of the Graduate Record Exam, and the Test of English as a Foreign
Language, both produced by the Educational Testing Service in Princeton. Working
with ETS was one of the most challenging and enjoyable aspects of my
professional career, and our association lasted for close to ten years.
My ultimate plan was to return to the faculty, which
occurred in the mid-90s, and began to teach in earnest once again and to pursue
research projects associated with the University Art Museum. I am deeply
involved supporting the Museum and currently serve on its Board. We have
interesting collections of Egyptian and Asian art, and I recently completed a
catalogue of our Pre-dynastic Egyptian objects. Retirement came in 2002, but I
am part of a program that allows professors to work up to half time for up to
five years. Now two quarters are spent teaching and the rest of the year is
free.
My wife and I have been opera fanatics forever (Robin was
on the LA Opera League Board) and that led us to Santa Fe, where we planned to
retire. We now spend half the year in New Mexico, currently in
Albuquerque, and the rest of the time in Fontana, east of
Los Angeles, with our pug, Polly, and three cats, Max, Joey and
Squeak. I occasionally speak with David Sherman, and am in regular contact with
Jake Cooley and Dick Knapp.
I have never forgotten running across one of Freud’s
insights during my Wesleyan years -- work and love are crucial to being human,
and living the “good life” that we discussed together in our freshman year
Western Civ classes. I could not be more indebted to Westech than some
classmates in both of these areas.
As a small town boy who read and debated, I was told that
I would grow up to be a lawyer by studying hard in college, going to law school,
and (in some order) establishing a home town practice, marrying a local girl,
raising a family, and contributing to the community. Sometimes, even I believed
it. However, something unexpected occurred during my senior fall at Wesleyan --
I didn’t send out one law school application.
Then, just before Christmas break, I happened to pass
Willie Kerr’s open office door. By chance, he looked up, saw me, and called me
in. I hadn’t seen him all fall, so we had some catching up to do. We both had
had our first Wesleyan class together -- he a new faculty member, I a freshman
-- and had sporadically kept in touch. Then Dr. Kerr asked me: “John, what are
you doing next year?” I explained that I always expected to go to law school,
but hadn’t sent out one application. Dr. Kerr said: “I know.” I asked him: “How
do you know?” He just responded: “I know.” He then told me of a brother (as I
recall) who was a lawyer, and compared his brother’s and his own work and lives,
concluding: “I deal in the birth of ideas, creation, and the young. John, think
of teaching.” It took a year of premed study after commencement (I only knew
then that I wanted to help people, and medicine seemed the best way) before I
understood that Dr. Kerr was right. And so I started graduate school in
political science in order to teach. Without Willie Kerr (as I only now can call
him), I don’t know whether those satisfying years would have happened for me in
my work.
Wesleyan also helped Catherine and me find one another.
One September 1962, Sunday evening, we were properly introduced by Father Val
Cukras, Wesleyan’s Catholic Chaplain, as the president of one Newman Club
(Wesleyan) to a new student on campus and the past president of another Newman
Club (the American University of Beirut). That year, I competed for Catherine’s
attention with 200 white rats in Judd Hall (who usually seemed to be winning) as
she valiantly struggled, and finally earned her M.A. in physiological psychology
under Dr. Robert Thompson’s mentorship. Catherine graduated with us that spring,
and is a member of our class -- ‘63G. In the end, I hardly married a local girl.
Fast-forwarding, Catherine and I celebrated our 41st
wedding anniversary this year. We have lived in Massachusetts, gloriously (and
too briefly) on the coast of Maine, and for the past 20 years in West
Hartford, not far from Middletown. Until the troubles in Lebanon made
it inadvisable, frequent summer trips to Lebanon were the norm for mother
(sometimes father) and children. We have two sons and a daughter whom we dearly
love, who (finally, thankfully) have finished their educations, and are launched
in their careers in Manhattan -- 25 years of tuitions are over!
Catherine still works in psychology -- she directs and
teaches in the marriage and family therapy program at Saint Joseph College, just
down the street from our home. You all should know what a revered figure Gus
Napier is among therapists in Catherine’s field -- his books remain required
reading in graduate courses across the country. It could be that poetry and
beauty heal. I may be one of the few Wes alumns who still is in his major -- I
teach political science and public administration at Sacred Heart University in
Fairfield, Connecticut.
Once our children were launched, Catherine and I
gradually turned to joint research projects. We have published two books
together -- and surprisingly remain married: Reflexive Communication in the
Culturally Diverse Workplace, and The Inquiring Organization:
Tacit Knowledge, Conversation, and Knowledge Creation: Skills for 21st
Century Organizations. The first book suggested new communication skills to
realize common ground in our diverse workplaces. It also suggested mutual
knowledge of differing verbal and nonverbal communication behaviors among white
males, women, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans for workplace
cohesiveness and achievement.
The second book suggests that to be a learning
organization is necessary but insufficient in today’s fast-paced environment.
For ipso facto, we can only learn explicit knowledge that is
already-known, and such public knowledge confers no competitive advantage. Only
by inquiring to surface tacit knowledge -- the private, expert knowledge that is
not-yet-known -- is the new knowledge created that enables organizations to move
forward. More than a decade’s work in two paragraphs! Any possible future books
will need to have shorter titles.
Family, each other, work, friends, and some travel
basically describe our lives. We frequently vacation with our children, and over
the years have visited England, Greece, Italy, the Caribbean, and France
together. We would love to return to Lebanon, if it ever settles down.
Unbelievably, retirement looms. How is it that one reaches age 65? One answer
may be: “Fortunately.”
We don’t know what the next chapter might be in
Catherine’s and my own life together. It may be that over these years we all
have learned a common truth (I know I have): life is not a straight line. I just
remember reading Freud’s words at a heavy, oak table, bathed in a pool of gentle
light from a brass lamp in Olin so long ago -- or was it yesterday -- and feel
grateful today.
What an unforgettable opportunity it was to have
experienced the alchemy of EQV with you during its brief, but shining years. It
truly was what one of the leading thinkers on organizations, Warren Bennis,
called a “Great Group.” Looking forward with anticipation to seeing everyone
again!
Professional:
Albany
Medical College, MD, 1963 - 1967
Peter Bent Brigham Hospital & Harvard internship and
junior residency in Medicine 1967 - 1969
Cornell University Medical College and
New York Hospital residency in Neurology 1969 - 1972
NIH US Public Health Service (NINDS & NIDR), Bethesda,
Clinical Associate and Guest Worker 1972 - 1975
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell
University 1976 - 1989, Faculty
University of Minnesota, Department of Neurology,
Professor & Chair, 1989 - 1995
University of California San
Francisco, Neurology, Professor & Vice Chair &
San Francisco General Hospital, Chief Neurology Service, 1995 -
present.
Personal:
Married, Ellen Price, 1965 - present
Children & grandchildren:
Matthew (Toronto)
Mika, Maceo
Elizabeth (Palo Alto)
Christopher
Nathaniel '95 (Dublin)
Abigail
Catherine '02 (San Francisco)
After Wesleyan I went on to get a Master of Fine Arts
degree in painting and art history. For years I taught art and/or theater
(and/or a lot of other things it seems) in private schools in Massachusetts and
Connecticut. After a sort of dark, burn out period (no details here), I worked
as an illustrator, portrait painter, even for three years as a designer of
exhibits at a science center. All the while I have painted pictures and have
actually won a few awards in that realm. I continue to paint and show my work
locally.
I consider myself very fortunate to be now living in the
small coastal town of Brooklin, Maine, known for its many builders of
traditional wooden boats. I own a Beetle cat, and have just finished the spring
ritual of preparing to put her overboard. I moved to Brooklin in 1995 with Betsy
Gardiner, my partner in life since about 1990. We live on Herrick Bay with a
cat, Spike. In the summer we look forward to being besieged by Betsy’s three
children, spouses, and now eight grandchildren.
Community involvement for me includes: being in charge of
arranging for and hanging the monthly art shows at the library, playing the
snare drum in the town band, helping with the local sailing program for Brooklin
youngsters (mostly I do the graphics for the posters and fund raising letters-
but the float I painted for the 4th of July parade won 1st prize!) and painting
a Renaissance style mural at the elementary school. Hanging in the
Bangor library you will find a sculpture piece in the form of an
early airplane that I made as a tribute to Alberto Santos-Dumont. Further afield,
Betsy and I are passionate (what else?) Argentine tango dancers and travel as
far as Montreal or Boston
to participate in tango workshops and milongas.
Betsy and I spent last January and February in
Portland, Oregon. We were there primarily to be near her daughter and
family, who live nearby in Hood River, and also to be near my son Jesse
(Wesleyan class of ‘92) and his wife Julija (Wesleyan class of ‘91) who live in
Seattle. Jesse works as an I.T. person for a non-profit group but his
avocation is Javanese gamelan. He and Julija are both very active in the greater
Seattle gamelan scene. While in Portland,
as well as enjoying city life in general, Betsy and I participated in the local
Argentine tango activities, for which Portland is especially celebrated.
Sadly, I have lost contact with Wesleyan friends over the
years, and I look forward to re-connecting with the EQV gang. Among my memories
of the Wesleyan years, my happiest are associated with those friendships. K-k-k-
Katy- where are you now?
After Wesleyan: the CIA, graduate school at Stony Brook
(PhD in Victorian Lit.), Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at
Austin. All four year stints. Got interested in interdisciplinary
research and writing; a few published articles with academically unacceptable
subjects and approaches (e.g. “Oedipus and the Rest of the Boys in the Pulps,”
“Sex and War in The Red Badge of Courage”). Also got a wife who hated Texas and
who moved to New York City to be the managing
editor of “Penthouse Forum.”
With no tenure probable and with no
New York-area academic jobs in sight, I moved to NYC anyway and
returned to speech writing, which I had done while at Wesleyan. After a year or
so of freelancing for anyone who’d pay me (including my drycleaner who traded
cleaning for speeches he needed as the head of his local Rotary Club), I lucked
into a job at Hill and Knowlton, then the world’s largest PR firm.
At H&K, I built a department of writers and then, because
I seemed to know how to make money with ancillary services, became head of all
“creative” services, head of all special services (opinion polling, technology
p.r., anything that they didn’t know what to do with). I learned and had a lot
of experience in crisis management and financial p.r., particularly M&A, doing
counseling in both throughout my nearly 25 years in p.r.
Finally, I became the deputy director of
New York Office, but when my arch-enemy became CEO, another, smaller
p.r. firm offered me a job as head of their tiny New York
office. I took the job, feeling as a friend of mine in Texas once said, like a
ship leaving a sinking rat.
The new firm, Fleishman-Hillard, offered me what I wanted
in a job. Equity, sure, but more important, or just as important, a firm where
headquarters was 1,500 miles away (working at HQ can be a serious pain),
complete freedom to build an office as I wanted it, and the willingness to spend
money to build a real presence in New York. I repaid all three advantages by losing close
to $2.5 million in the first 4 years.
At that point, we made our first yearly profit, albeit a
small one, and never lost money again, becoming the second largest office in the
firm and moving into the ranks of the top five offices in
New York City. Strangely enough, it was all fun -- tense but fun. And
a refuge from a marriage that was rapidly falling apart as well as a bridge to a
new, happier marriage.
At both firms, I built organizations that replicated EQV,
or at least what I thought of as EQV. I hired very smart, funny, energetic,
hard-working people who took the mission seriously but never themselves. I fired
anyone who threw temper tantrums or who violated ethical standards (generally,
you only have to do this once; the legend of your having done it becomes
sufficient later). These people, like the EQVers, had strong personalities, and
occasionally had to be taught how to play well together, but you don’t get
talent without the personality. Luckily, I was taught from birth how to deal
with strong personalities – you should have met my parents. Or not.
By this time, I had gotten a divorce and married a
wonderful woman, Elena Sansalone, had ten years of psychotherapy, and, with
Elena, had a child, Ben, who was from the first the sunniest, smartest, and
least self-conscious kid in the world. At the age of 4, he appeared solo on
stage at a family Club Med and sang “One Banana, Two Banana.” He’s 14 now, and
is still smart, funny, and enormously tolerant of his parents.
Several years ago, Fleishman-Hillard was bought by
Omnicom, a huge communications conglomerate. I stayed on for a few years, slowly
working my replacements into position for my leaving, becoming Eastern Regional
President (all the offices in Canada, Boston, NY,
and Atlanta – don’t ask about DC), and head of
the worldwide Technology Practice. Finally I retired.
Why?
The short answer is “because I could.” There are other
reasons, among which loomed the fact that I missed reading. You just can’t do
much reading, real reading, when you’re working that hard and spending too much
time in airports.
Now, I’m active on the board of the
New York Urban League, writing a book on Slogans and Catchphrases in
American History (who wants to write a book on p.r., or read one, for that
matter), traveling on eco-tours largely for birds, stamp collecting (a habit I
got from my father), gardening (we have a house 100 miles north of the city),
walking the dog twice a day (do NOT ever get a dog no matter how much your
children say they’ll share the work), and spending time with Elena and Ben. I
have an office at FH, at least until everyone forgets who I was. And I read,
constantly; mostly novels (real ones like Conrad interspersed with murder
mysteries).
I do not miss work.
From Wesleyan I headed to Philadelphia for a master’s in social work at Bryn Mawr
College in Philadelphia (community organizing/planning). I took off
for the Peace Corps for 2 years, doing child welfare planning in
Lima, Peru. Got to travel in Peru and Chile, and began a love affair
with pre-Columbian studies (the Incas and their
predecessors) that has stayed with me. After travel in Central America, I
returned to social welfare planning in Michigan, and met and married my wife
Lucy, who was completing work on her doctorate in social psychology. The
education bug bit again, and we returned to Philadelphia and Bryn Mawr for my doctoral studies.
Lucy began a long career in social science contract
research while I began a 17-year teaching career at Bryn Mawr and Temple
University schools of social work. I “retired” from teaching in 1990 to go to
work for the accreditation agency for social work education, consulting with
hundreds of programs over the next 11 years. Amy second “retirement” was in
2001, when I began my own consulting business to social work education programs,
which continues on a part-time basis now.
I’ve been fortunate to have collaborated on 3 books
published during and after my teaching years. I helped start the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, DC, a group dedicated to
the study and support of pre-Columbian cultures
and archaeology. Several trips to Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico have resulted from
this interest. My third and final retirement looms, and pre-Columbian studies and travel beckon.
Norman Daniels is Mary B. Saltonstall Professor and
Professor of Ethics and Population Health at Harvard School of Public Health.
Formerly Goldthwaite Professor, Chair of the Tufts Philosophy Department, and
Professor of Medical Ethics at Tufts Medical School, where he taught from 1969
until 2002, he has degrees from Wesleyan (B.A. Summa, 1964), Balliol College,
Oxford (B.A., First Honors, 1966), and Harvard (Ph.D., Plympton Dissertation
Prize, 1971. He has written widely in the philosophy of science (Thomas
Reid's `Inquiry': the Geometry of Visibles and the Case for Realism (1974;
Stanford, 1989), ethics, political and social philosophy (including Reading
Rawls (1975; Stanford, 1989) and medical ethics. He has published over 150
articles in anthologies and such journals as Isis, Philosophy of Science,
Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, Ethics, Philosophy and Public
Affairs, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Revue
Internationale de Philosophie, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Bioethics,
JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, Lancet,
Hastings Center Report, Health Affairs, Nature Medicine, WHO Bulletin,
Economics and Philosophy, Daedalus and others. His most recent books
include Just Health Care (Cambridge, 1985); Am I My Parents' Keeper?
An Essay on Justice Between the Young and the Old (Oxford, 1988); Seeking
Fair Treatment: From the AIDS Epidemic to National Health Care Reform,
Oxford, 1995); Justice and Justification: Reflective Equilibrium in Theory
and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1996); (with Donald Light and
Ronald Caplan) Benchmarks of Fairness for Health Care Reform (Oxford,
1996); (with Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, and Dan Wikler) From Chance to
Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge, 2000); (with Bruce Kennedy and
Ichiro Kawachi) Is Inequality Bad for Our Health? (Beacon Press, 2000);
and (with James Sabin) Setting Limits Fairly: Can We Learn to Share Medical
Resources? (Oxford, 2002). He is currently doing research on how to adapt
the "benchmarks of fairness" for use in less developed countries (WHO
Bulletin, June 2000), and he is working on Just Health, a descendant
of Just Health Care.
A member of the Institute of Medicine, a Fellow of the
Hastings Center, a Founding Member of the National Academy of Social Insurance
and of the International Society for Equity in Health, he has consulted with
organizations, commissions, and governments in the U.S. and abroad on issues of
justice and health policy, including for the United Nations, WHO, and the
President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine. He served
as a member of the Ethics Working Group of the Clinton White House Health Care
Task Force (Spring 1993), as a member of the Public Health Service Expert Panel
on Cost Effectiveness and Clinical Preventive Medicine, as a member of a
National Academy of Social Insurance study panel on the social role of Medicare,
and as a member of a Century Fund task force on Medicare reform. He served four
years as a founding member of the National Cancer Policy Board, established by
the Institute of Medicine and the Commission on the Life Sciences, and on the
Advisory Board of the Open Society Foundation project on Medicine as a
Profession. He is currently on the International Bioethics Advisory Board of
PAHO and on an IOM Committee on the use of Cost Effectiveness Analysis in
regulatory contexts. He has held Fellowships and Grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the National
Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation, the Retirement Research Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the
Merck Company Foundation, and others. He held a Robert Wood Johnson
Investigator's Award for the period 1998-2001, as well as a Rockefeller
Foundation grant for the adaptation of the benchmarks.
Norman Daniels Personal Bio
Since my other biosketch is a standard academic one, I
thought my old friends should have the more personal scoop. After leaving
Wesleyan, I spent two years learning some philosophy at Oxford before returning
to a Harvard PhD program in philosophy of science. Oxford has 8 week terms and 6
week vacations between them – perfect for hitching around Europe, which I did
extensively. It gave me a broad perspective on the growing Vietnam war, and when
I returned I was primed to become the activist I had never been. At Harvard, I
ended up co-chair of SDS and gave the speech on the steps of University Hall
April 9, 1969, that began the take-over of that administration building and thus
led to the Harvard Strike. I would have been fired as a teaching fellow, so I
followed my advisors advice and quit that position to take a part-time job at
Tufts, teaching philosophy of science and political philosophy. I stayed 33
years.
My wife Anne had come to Boston in 1967 from Texas as a member of the Teacher Corp.
She participated in a walkout of several teachers who would not cross a picket
line, and became one of the Gibson Five, prominent in anti-racist activities
with high schoolers in Boston. Because she was organizing against drugs, she
faced death threats and was sent to live in my apartment in a white working
class neighborhood in Somerville. Trapped, she ended up marrying me. My
political organizing continued in Lynn, a factory town north of
Boston, as well as in radical faculty groups on campus.
Some of my first writings were on the IQ controversy, and
I gradually shifted from philosophy of science into political philosophy.
Competing theories of justice (Rawls, Nozick, later egalitarian views) emerged
during the seventies, and I began what became a career transforming project,
developing an account of justice and health and health care. That ongoing
interest has more recently led to work in developing countries on health reform
and to work on resource allocation and limit setting in health policy. My move
to Harvard School of Public Health 3 years ago was an effort to enhance
collaborations around that international focus of my work.
Anne and I are looking forward to our son Noah’s wedding
in September. He and his fiancé live in the next town over where he works for a
small computer company. Anne is a neuropsychologist who works harder than anyone
I know. In the 1980s we encountered John Eten on the Cape (I had cut my foot and
he treated me), and he helped us find a house in the town where he lives. We now
spend three days a week on the Cape, my writing retreat, exercising our border
collies, who take us for a run every day, pursuing a hobby of photography, and
finding refuge from the scramble of Boston.
Places -Ithaca, New York
(’64 – ’66); New York City (’66 – ’77); Katonah,
Westchester County, NY (’77 – ’78); McLean, Virginia (’78 – 2000);
Pittsburgh (2000 - )
People – Married Esta Reichstein, of West Orange, NJ, in
1969; two children, Tanya, born in 1971 (now working on AIDS issues for the DC
Government), Jedd, born in 1975 (film editor in NYC).
Some More Education - MA, Government and Southeast Asian
Studies, Cornell (’66); MBA, George Washington University (1985)
Work – VISTA volunteer and staff member,
New York Addiction Services Agency (“66 – ‘70’), Director, Hoboken,
NJ Municipal Home Improvement Program (housing rehabilitation – 70’ - 74’);
Deputy Director, Housing Action Council, White Plains, NY (’74 – ’78); Deputy
Director, Office of Urban Rehabilitation, US Department of Housing, DC (’78 –
’85), Owner, Vice President, and Real Estate Appraiser, Jefferson and Lee
Appraisals (’85 – present).
A few other stops along the way – Organized one of NYC’s
largest tenant organizations, the West Side Tenants Union (’71 – ’74); ran
(unsuccessfully) for New York State Assembly in
1975; co-coordinated the Northern Virginia campaign for Michael Dukakis in 1988;
was Wesleyan Annual Fund Chairman in 1966 – 1988; am now chairman of the
Squirrel Hill Historical Society in my Pittsburgh
neighborhood.
Some Comments – my professional life has had two major
twists entirely stimulated by outside events. I was all set to become a diplomat
in 1996 (with the Foreign Service exam passed) but had no interest in
representing US policy in Vietnam and shifted to domestic concerns instead.
Then, in 1985, I left the public sector because President Reagan was succeeding
in making Federal Civil Service an unpleasant place to work, particularly in
HUD. Both of the changes led to good things, but neither would have happened
without the events around me,
Our current real estate appraisal practice is nationwide
with a special focus on historical properties, apartments, and elderly care
facilities. The historical practice predominates, allowing us to work in some of
most exciting historical areas in the country, including numerous assignments in
pre Katrina New Orleans.
I look forward to seeing many old friends in November.
Bob Jackson (’64)
The summer after graduation, I worked for the Yosemite
Park and Curry company as a laborer and water truck driver. Got there, was
assigned a horse, and took off with 12 ranch hand types up into the high country
to set up the 10 or so high Sierra camps that Yosemite runs. It was fabulous—up
with the dawn, eat a huge breakfast of steak and eggs and pancakes made by the
cowboy cooks, work like a madman for 10 hours interrupted only for lunch except
on days when we were riding the 10 or so miles to the next camp, eat again, play
poker and drink Jim Beam until asleep. Once the camps were all set up three
weeks later, I turned in my horse for a water truck and spend the middle of the
summer driving around watering down the dirt roads to keep the dust down,
flirting with tourists and other staff.. At the end of the August we took off
again on horseback, packed the tents, beds, etc. back into the stone cabin in
which the kitchen was located. Finished the summer in great shape and returned
east to start Columbia P&S.
4 years of medical school in New York was mostly hard work but there was plenty of time
for New York cultural and social offerings. I
especially remember the night that the blackout occurred. We spent the night
expected to be staffing the emergency room in case of an emergency but instead
we traveled downtown to see what it was like with no lights, across the Hudson
to New Jersey with a six-pack climbing an apartment complex that was under
construction and watching the whole City dark except for the car lights. The
bars of course remained open by candlelight and we finished the evening drinking
in a local pub and pairing off with female classmates who found the night
particularly stimulating! I started out thinking that I was going to be an
obstetrician but ended up concluding it was the babies I was most interested in
so finally elected pediatrics.
My last year was spent mostly working in a missionary
hospital in Hualien, Taiwan, on a tropical medicine fellowship provided by
Columbia and the US Public Health Service. There were three Mennonite
missionary doctors who came back to the states every three years for a year’s
sabbatical during which they took training in additional specialties. Imagine
the diverse expertise they had accumulated after about age 36-45. Fabulous
teaching and exposure to diseases I have never seen in the U.S..
A few miles from the hospital was an isolated area of
mountain woods which turned out to be a top secret Ranger training base for the
U.S. Learned 1st hand from a lot of rangers while drinking local beer
in one of many tiny little family bars which dotted the town where we were
housed all about Vietnam and mostly decided I didn’t want to go there. On a few
weekends my classmate and I would hop a ride on the old DC-3 to Taipei. This plane was the only one that served the area
and we spent the weekend at one of several adult recreation sites that had
originally been built by the Japanese when they occupied Taiwan. We also
wandered Taipei eating well, shopping for
inexpensive goods, including ersatz medical texts for about $10 that cost $100
in the U.S. My ticket was written to allow extensive travel on the way back:
Philippines, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Malaysia,
Thailand, Cambodia, Calcutta, Kathmandu, Nepal, Delhi,
Bombay, Pakistan, Lebanon, Istanbul,
Athens, Rome and home to New York. What a whirlwind—I so wish I had the chance to
return to some of those exotic sites and spend more than a couple of days. Never
happened.
I returned to begin a Pediatric Internship at the
University of Virginia in Charlottesville Va.
Spent the year learning how much I hadn’t learned in med school despite
graduating 12th in my class. Also met a woman and married her in
March of 69. Jayne was a nurse from Livingston New Jersey who had just gotten
her Masters at Emory and had returned to U.Va. where she had graduated. I also
spent my few days off learning to fly from a grass airfield a few miles from
Monticello—Jefferson’s home in case you forgot.
We returned to New York
and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital on July 1,1969
where I took a year of residency in Pediatrics at Babies Hospital. Unfortunately
only 11 of the 18 house staff showed up, the rest got drafted as the army was
getting desperate for medics in Vietnam. I found myself coming on duty at the
Presbyterian emergency room at midnight already 100 charts behind. So sleep
every other night was not remotely possible. I got some notoriety one night when
I awoke to the smell of burning rubber and opened my door to completely black
acrid smoke. My room was just down the hall from the Newborn Intensive Care Unit
where 30 critically ill infants resided. I put in the alarm crawling on the
floor, got to the nursery where I directed the emptying of the Nursery into the
street since there was no way to exit except through the fire. When we finished
I went back in and emptied the regular nursery that was one floor up. I found
myself on the front page of the NY Times for I somehow got credited, probably
unfairly, with saving many lives. A few months of that was enough , however, so
we went back to Charlottesville for my last year. It was very civilized
compared to the craziness of a New York hospital
at that time.
Fortunately I had successfully applied to join the US
Public Health Service and at the end of my last year of residency I joined the
Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Centers for Disease Control. They sent us
to Hawaii for two years. We had two children while there. My wife enjoyed the
privilege of being the wife of the highest ranking officer at the time and the
Tripler Army Hospital took such good care of her that she decided to have both
of our kids while we were there. I spent two years investigating outbreaks and
running the field trials for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines that were
being tested on the children of the outer islands. I enjoyed particularly
investigating an outbreak of Hepatitis on a nudist camp with 75 residents at a
place called Taylor camp on Kauai. It was a piece of property owned by Elizabeth
Taylor’s brother—a fascinating story for another time.
I came very close to staying in Hawaii for I loved the
place and had several offers to practice with friends for whom I had covered the
emergency room to earn a bit of extra money. I had become enamored of public
health, however, so I agreed to accept an offer from CDC to become deputy
director of the Field Services Division in Atlanta.
Just before finalizing my plans, however, Nixon imposed a number of rescissions
and deferrals and closed the Ecological Investigations Program in
Kansas City. The net result of this was that all of the 25 or so
doctors at the EIP were transferred to CDC to work out the remains of their
commissions. So, with 25 other docs with nothing to do, and a budget that had
been cut so that there was little able to be done, I elected to accept another
job—that of State Epidemiologist for the State of Virginia.
We returned to Virginia to the Virginia State Health
Department in Richmond. We managed to buy a
lovely home in Chester, a small town a few miles south of Richmond. After a couple of years I was beginning to get
a bit bored and was thinking about changing . I had the good fortune (career
wise) of discovering a group of workers in a small chemical plant in Hopewell
Virginia who were being poisoned by a chemical known as Kepone. I closed the
plant using an emergency order available to the Health Commissioner. and chaired
a task force involving the State Water Control Board, the Virginia Institute of
Marine Science, State Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Fisheries and many
others. We led an investigation that lasted two years and involved also EPA,
CDC, the National Cancer Institute, National Environmental Health Sciences, and
the FDA As a result I was thrown in to a wild multi-year ride during which I
spent a great deal of time testifying before Congressional Committees, Federal
District Court, twice on 60 Minutes and many other shows, had my own local TV
show segment and generally became a very prominent Virginian. I also got
promoted a couple of times and found myself Assistant Commissioner of the
Department and Legislative Rep. for the Department. The Allied Chemical
Corporation ended up paying about $15,000,000 in fines, at the time one of the
largest environmental fines ever demanded.
As a result of the notoriety which came along with the
Kepone tragedy, also, I received a number of interesting job offers. I accepted
the job of Commissioner of the South Carolina Department of Health and
Environmental Control and in 1979 we moved to Columbia.
I served for 7 ½ years during the term of Richard Riley, Governor. Dick was a
wonderful, smart, liberal attorney with whom I got along fabulously. Dick was
interested in many of the same public health issues that I was. South Carolina
was one of the few states that had both traditional public health and
environmental health in the same agency. That was its main appeal to me. Riley
cared as I did about access problems for medical care in the south, improved
long term care for the elderly, improving infant mortality and, on the
environmental side, radioactive waste disposal, chemical waste and hazardous
waste, and the array of pollution related problems that were gradually consuming
us all. It was an exciting period . While working with the Southern Governor’s
Assn. on the infant mortality problem I ended up working closely with a couple
of other southern governors and their wives. Bill Clinton and Hillary became, if
not close friends, friendly acquaintances and colleagues. This was to have some
significance a few years later. During this period I was active in the National
Association of State and Territorial Health Officials serving as Chair of the
Environment Committee and later the AIDS Committee. I was President elect when I
decided to resign so never got to serve as that.
Unfortunately Riley was replaced by a right wing,
southern Baptist, conservative, Republican former Congressman named Carroll
Campbell. One of his first questions to me was “do you guys really give out
condoms in the health department?” when told yes he announced that that would
have to stop! So much for family planning, preventing unnecessary abortions,
preventing syphilis, gonorrhea, and later, HIV. It was clear that he was not
someone I wanted to work for. At the same time I was drinking too much as I had
much of the time since it began at Wesleyan. I was beginning to realize that
alcohol was progressing to become a real problem so I admitted myself to a
Health Professional Chemical Dependency Program in Atlanta
and spent a number of months cleaning up my act. Unfortunately at that time also
my wife and I decided to bring things to an end and we divorced shortly
thereafter. Fortunately we had little bitterness and remain close friends today.
Upon my return from treatment I resigned my position and
began to explore alternative things to do for the rest of my career. I taught
for 3 years in the Department of Preventive Medicine of the University of South
Carolina School of Medicine and did a number of interesting consultations for a
number of states who were looking for someone to advise them on how best to run
a state health department. I enjoyed this experience although I concluded that
it wasn’t something I wanted to do forever. Too often the state was just
interested in paying me to agree with what they had already concluded about
their department and weren’t really interested in doing the best or even the
right thing.
I had also become very interested in alcohol and drug
dependency as a clinical problem and there were few health professionals
available to help people who were struggling with them. I trained in counseling
and alcohol and drug medicine. I got Board Certified and became the Medical
Director of a large Episcopal Diocese Pastoral Counseling center in
Columbia. I started a practice in addictions medicine but mostly I
spent the next five years while my children were in college, discovering that
one cannot make a living at addictions medicine. The recent shift to managed
care resulted in a huge drop in the payments for behavioral medicine problems.
Perhaps that is why there are so few such physicians available!.
I followed the rules so didn’t worry about the risks
inherent in this practice as well. Many of the rules that you follow in treating
someone with drug problems, especially when they are detoxing, are not provided
for in the laws administered by the Drug Enforcement Administration. One
patient, a nurse I had known for years, had become re-addicted when during a
surgical procedure the gynecologist had punctured her intestines and she had
developed severe peritonitis. Following her discharge she came to me for help
and was in the middle of early detox and recovery when she developed another
severe surgical problem which required that she undergo several procedures. Of
course she got seriously re-addicted. Ultimately I was able to get her admitted
to inpatient treatment but the whole process took almost a year. The first bad
advice I got when I discovered that I was being investigated by the DEA was to
re-admit myself to the Atlanta treatment program
in order to demonstrate my contrition and allow them to make the case that I was
depressed and that my depression had caused me to have poor judgment. All I
gained from that was $30,000 in debt and a long, slow stay away from my family
and friends. It didn’t help at all with the case.
Upon my return, I found myself being arrested for
violation of the narcotics statutes for some of the prescription practices I had
followed with her and for some I had not but was accused of. Despite the fact
that her record was the only one they could find anything wrong with, the fact
that some of her prescriptions were obviously forged—the very same ones,
strangely that were not recorded in my clinical records, and the fact that she
had ultimately had a good outcome, I found myself in federal court fighting with
federal prosecutors who were only interested in “getting a doctor” especially
the former DHEC Commissioner, The prosecutor just happened to be an attorney
that I had been forced to fire from my department 6 years before! .I was at the
point where I had just closed my practice and had no money so I couldn’t afford
the kind of attorney who might have been able to rescue me. The first bad advice
I got was to re-admit myself to the Atlanta
treatment program in order to demonstrate my contrition and allow them to make
the case that I was depressed and that my depression had caused me to have poor
judgment. All I gained from that was $30,000 in debt and a long, slow stay away
from my family and friends. It didn’t help at all with the case.
At the end of 6 years, having used up all of my life
savings trying to make a go of it, I was totally broke. I found myself giving up
and signing a plea bargain for a couple of misdemeanor record keeping
violations. I decided to re-enter public health while serving my 3 years of
probation. Needless to say I ended that period of my life with bitterness and
anger at a system that could be so unfair and so unprofessional. South Carolina
had a license forfeiture procedure for such violations. I was told by my lousy
attorney that I should just admit to what they were alleging and that they would
put my license into a conditional status while I had an opportunity to
demonstrate no further violations. Turned out to be more bad advice. He was
under estimating the retro SC politics. The Board had been taken over by the
appointees of Dick Riley’s successor—all of similar political ilk and I didn’t
have a chance since I had been a Riley appointee.. So my license there was
forfeited. New York, where I had my original
license decided that they, too, wanted to take my license—an automatic action
when it is forfeit in another state.. I fought that with the much more able
legal help of my brother and absent the politics that had been largely at play
in South Carolina. I won the case in New York and
consequently still have a license there. I do my best to stay away from South
Carolina these days.
AIDS had recently been discovered and I had a real
interest in it. Through a former colleague and an old friend, I came to be
offered a position in the White House as deputy director of the Office of
National AIDS Policy. This was the first year of the Clinton Administration.
Needless to say, having known Clinton earlier did not hurt when I sought this
job. I moved to Chevy Chase into a small apartment in the basement of the home
of some dear old family friends who were in their 80s and were delighted to have
me nearby. The woman had been my mother’s room-mate at Columbia when they both attended the School of Journalism
in the thirties.
After a year of White House work, I concluded that I
basically hated it. I enjoyed reconnecting with Dick Riley who had taken the job
of Secretary of Education and I enjoyed being in Washington again. It was
exciting being in the White House and traveling with the President when his
agenda touched on health, AIDS, or Drug Problems. What I hated, on the other
hand, was that most of the people working in the White House were young lawyers,
mostly the sons of wealthy democratic contributors who were given important
sounding jobs and who thought they knew what they were doing but generally
hadn’t a clue. It got to be a major headache constantly compromising
professional issues to their strange naïve perceptions of what the most
politically attractive solution was. After a year I tired of the nonsense and
rejoined the public health community as Chief of the Bureau of Communicable
Disease for the State of Delaware. I have been there ever since, running the
States HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted disease, tuberculosis and Immunization
programs. I will retire in a couple more years--if I can afford it, of course.
As a result of genes and a rather craven lifestyle for
many years, my health is not what I would like it to be I have diabetes with
severe neuropathy of both feet. I have had angioplasty on my heart, a Y by-pass
at the base of my aorta, and a popliteal by-pass to restore blood flow to my
right lower leg and foot. Sounds like I should travel with my own Cardiologist
like the president. That’s why I am trying so hard to get Steve Achuff to
accompany me to this reunion. Hah! Given all that, however, I am doing
remarkably well. My only real handicap (that I talk about, that is) is the
inability to walk far. Enough of my friends have gone on to their final reward
that I am grateful for the health that I retain.
Last year I had the immense good fortune of having my 32
year old daughter Jennifer ask if she could come live with me. She was having
trouble financially and could get her same job in Dover that she had in
Columbia. It was at a time when I was about to have surgery so she
justified it in her own mind that she was coming to take care of me. So I have a
housemate. She is a delight and a great cook so I have a wonderful arrangement.
Her level of housekeeping is roughly what it was when she was at Emory so you
can imagine what my house looks like most of the time! I was able to get her a
somewhat better job and she is now out from under the debts that represented the
main reason why she really came--looking for free rent! Best deal I ever paid
for. Unfortunately, of course, she now has a boyfriend in Philadelphia and spends much of her free time with him.
One day soon I suspect I will find myself alone again but it will have been a
terrific few years anyway.
My son Jason is 34, married and an Engineer working in
Raleigh for Travelers/Aetna/ Minneapolis
St. Paul Insurance Company. These three companies have merged in recent years
and I am clueless as to what they call themselves now. He went to Clemson, is a
championship swimmer, and a fine man of whom I couldn’t be prouder. I keep
trying to encourage them to produce me a grandchild but they are enjoying travel
to Italy and other joys of childless middle class life. One day they will
surprise me but not yet. They adore Raleigh and seem to have settled in for life.
After I graduated from Wesleyan in 1964, I went to the
University of California, Berkeley, where (in addition to going to jail several
times: civil rights, Free Speech Movement, People's Park, etc.) I earned the
M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history. In 1965 I married Judy Kerst. We have two
children--Nathaniel, born 1973; Hannah, born 1975--both of whom entered the
world in Copenhagen, where we lived 1972-75, supported by Fulbright and Danforth
Fellowships. Judy and I divorced in 1990. Since 1991 I have been together with
Margaret Ryan Hellman, dividing my time between the US and Copenhagen.
In 1975 I was appointed to the History Department at
Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut,
where I have been ever since, advancing through the ranks to full professor. I
have published a couple of books and a lot of scholarly articles, mostly, though
not exclusively, dealing with the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard and other
Scandinavian topics.
When not in Connecticut or Copenhagen, I spend much of my
time at my house in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where I have time to
read, write, and enjoy the outdoors. I'm still active in the community and am
particularly interested in conservation issues (I'm a Conservation Commissioner
in my local town) and in maintaining the separation of church and state. (With
the support of the New Hampshire Council for the Humanities I'm doing workshops
on the topic for high school civics teachers, and in Vermont I'm to host
community meetings on the subject, supported by that state's Council for the
Humanities.)
I am fairly confident that in early September 1960, Vic
Butterfield said to the green as grass Class of 1964 assembled in the Chapel not
"look to your left, now look to your right, one of you won't be here in four
years" but rather " if these are the best four years of your life, either
Wesleyan has failed you or you have failed Wesleyan." Vic was right, in
retrospect, not only because of all the foolish and particularly immature things
I did thereafter-especially in my first two years- but also because if college
isn't ultimately only the energizing prelude to the life you try to live to its
fullest thereafter, then you missed the point. That said, it is clear to me that
those four years were critical in confirming in me not only the zeal and some of
the skills necessary to try to effect social change but also in introducing me
at my first mixer at Smith College exactly forty five years ago this month
(thanks to Dave Skaggs and his older sister, Joyce, President of Clark House) to
the effervescent woman who I would love, lose and then finally and happily marry
twenty five years later. I would say that she won me immediately when she walked
through the door of Clark House but if not then definitely later than fall when
Judith Tick took the Peter Pan bus from Northampton to Middletown and played
glorious Gershwin and Cole Porter on the battered piano in the living room at
EQV.
After two great kids (one for each of us in intervening
marriages), four books(hers) and a pioneering career in American musicology, and
one trial law career (mine) larded with all the pro bono I could get my tolerant
partners to sanction , we seem to be hitting our strides together as we cruise
with all our Class of 1964 classmates into the unfamiliar but thus far
comfortable terrain of our sixties. If life can sometimes feel like the Boston Marathon on a Patriot's Day when it is about 60
degrees and cloudy, when you are lucky, then I aspire for the two of us to be
about in Wellesley at this point with the stamina to cruise up and down those
Heartbreak Hills and on down Beacon Street right past the end of our street in
Brookline where it is only two and one half miles to the finish. We shall see.
After all, I did complete two Boston Marathons;
naturally, it was that flat imitation event in New York that finished off a lot of the cartilage in my
right knee, not those Newton hills.
What influenced the trajectory of my life during those
years in Middletown? The exchange program we set up with Tuskegee Instititute in
Alabama so that we could meet there and know something about our young African
American contemporaries that Wesleyan was still not willing to admit other than
in a tiny trickle. The demonstrations against hydrogen bomb testing and for
civil rights-the latter providing some of the motivation for me to go in 1966 as
a first year law student to live in Panola Country Mississippi for a long hot
summer of voter rights education, welfare benefits advice and encouraging what
was called freedom of choice education for young, desperately poor black kids in
the still all white schools along the edge of the vast Mississippi delta.
I had intended to say more but time has caught up with
me, it is 9:30 am on the morning of October 15 -- due date for these submissions
-- and my flight for Guantanamo Bay Cuba (and my fourth visit this year with my
six clients who are about to "celebrate" their fourth year in that awful place
our Government has created) leaves in an hour.. So, I look forward to speaking
with all of you about your lives and mine in three weeks.
My first course in economics at
Wesleyan was nothing short of a disaster, at least personally speaking. The
bottom line was that I found the subject to be monumentally tedious, not the
sort of material from which I wished to carve out an undergraduate major, never
mind a career as an academic economist. But inspirational teaching in my third
and fourth years, a chance summer appointment in 1963 as an economics researcher
for one of Kennedy's presidential commissions and postgraduate studies at King's
College, Cambridge convinced me that there was something more to the study of
"the dismal science" than I had originally appreciated.
In 1969 I was offered a tenured
lectureship in economics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England,
an innovative new university that attached high priority to good teaching and
the development of interdisciplinary studies. This suited me very well, as my
main academic interests involved work at the intersections of the social
sciences. Apart from teaching and research activities, I was heavily involved
during the 1970s in the recruitment of academic and research staff to the trade
union movement and the representation of their interests at local and national
levels. I was also active nationally in lobbying for increased participation in
UK higher education.
Following marriage to Amanda Evans, a
singer with English National Opera, I moved to London
in 1980, and our son Lee was born the following year. Despite the extra demands
of bi-weekly commuting to UEA, living in London offered new vistas both socially and
professionally. Between 1984 and 1992, I was co-chair of a national research
council group that met regularly at the London
School of Economics and whose objective was to encourage university research in
political economy.
During the late 1980s I became
interested in the debates over Soviet economic reforms under the Gorbachev era,
and this led to a series of academic exchanges with economists at Moscow State
University and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. By 1992 I found myself appointed
as co-Director of UEA's new European Development Centre, a vehicle by which the
university aimed to participate in externally-funded consultancy and training
activities in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. During the next six
years I was intensively involved in a succession of technical assistance
projects funded by the UK government and the European Commission, mainly in the
fields of higher education and public administration reform. I found this work
to be extraordinarily interesting and challenging. On one hand, immersion in the
concrete problems of transitional economies provided a rigorous testing ground
for abstract ideas and theories that I had long used in my academic work. On the
other hand, the projects were a compelling stimulus for acquiring new knowledge
that went well beyond my normal spheres of reference, particularly in the areas
of management science and public administration reform.
Since 1998, I have been living at a
slightly more leisurely pace in the South of France with new partner Anne Minost,
a lycee professor of French literature and language. Thanks to the internet and
modern telecommunications, I am able to live in France while still being
actively involved in international consultancy, in particular, as a member of
the Advisory Group of Public Administration International in
London. For me, the big issues in development consultancy remain the
pursuit of good governance and anti-corruption programmes, without which
development aid is likely to count for very little.
On a more personal level, I certainly
haven't forgotten my Wesleyan days and the outstanding people I came to know
during this period. The EQV motto esse quam videri has always seemed to
me to be highly relevant in a world where success is too often founded on the
motto's inverse. Despite the distance and the fact that my son's university
graduation ceremony in London just happens to be scheduled for the morning of 7
November, I remain very hopeful of being able to attend our reunion weekend.