Professor
I was born in London, England, and went to school there. I taught in Sarawak, East Malaysia, for a year as a volunteer with VSO, the British Volunteer Programme, and then got my first degree from the University of Cambridge. My PhD is from Yale. After a year teaching at the London School of Economics, I spent three years at the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, and its successor institution National University of Lesotho, before joining the faculty of FSU in 1976, as an assistant professor. I have been based in Tallahassee ever since, although I went back to Lesotho for a year in 1981-82 to establish the Research Division of the Institute of Southern African Studies; I have done short-term contract or consulting work in some fifteen countries in Africa, the Carribbean, Asia, Europe, and the Gulf; and was a Fulbright Scholar at Đại Học Kinh Tế Đà Nẵng, Vietnam, in 2007-08. Although my dissertation concerned mining in Africa, my major research interests have always been the economics of education and the interactions between labor migration and development and growth. Most of my publications concern one or other of those, mostly in the context of either Southern Africa or Southeast Asia. At FSU, I was undergraduate director for the Economics Department from 1977 to 1985, the first Associate Dean of the College of Social Sciences from 1985 to 1991, and Interim Dean 1986-87, and then Graduate Director in Economics from 1992 until 1997 when I became Chair of the Department. I remained Chair of the Department for three consecutive three-year terms, through August 2006. I was vice-chair of the Faculty Senate Steering Committee from 2002 to 2005, and then President of the Faculty Senate 2005 to 2007, which automatically made me a member of the Board of Trustees for that period. I also chaired the Senate’s University Curriculum Committee and the Distance Learning Policy Committee for several years, and have served on several other major committees including the Admissions Committee and the University Promotion and Tenure Committee. Although my initial university training was in mathematics, I regard myself as a very low-tech economist, and I regularly teach Principles. I studied economics originally because of my interest in the economies of Asia and Africa, and those are the two areas of the world that still most interest me, and which I continue to believe simple Principles-level economics can help us understand better. As an undergraduate, I was captain of my college boat club, and I am an enthusiastic member of Tallahassee Rowing Club.