European Commission fellow, Foreign Service diplomat teach
 

Two visiting officials, one from the European Commission and the other from the Foreign Service, have taught classes and mingled with students and faculty members this past school year. They are Jean-Louis Blanc, the School's 1999-2000 European Commission fellow, and Eleanor Savage-Gildersleeve, diplomat-in-residence from the U.S. State Department.
 

Jean-Louis Blanc
Jean-Louis Blanc comes to the LBJ School from a career that has taken him to locales from rural Mexico and islands in the Caribbean to Brussels and the headquarters of the European Union (EU).

For the 1999-2000 school year, he has served as the School's European Union Fellow, teaching a course and assisting students in their research.

In France, Blanc served as the head of the Radio-Communications Bureau in the French Post and Telecommunications Ministry before joining the Office of the French Prime Minister as deputy director of CNCL (the regulatory body for telecommunications and broadcasting). In 1989 he joined the European Commission, and since 1992 he has been principal administrator of Copernicus, a program that promotes research and development in Central and Eastern Europe. Copernicus works to increase cooperation between the EU and its neighbors and future members on issues ranging from public health and infrastructure to scientific collaboration.

Blanc's EU post arose from early work as a telecommunications engineer that brought him to Mexico in the 1970s. He was part of a group hired to work on digital communication exchanges for Mexico. "It was very interesting and very different from Europe, because it was like the Far West," Blanc said. "I heard a lot about Texas, but from the other side of the border."

Blanc specifically requested UT Austin when he applied to be one of 10 EU fellows at American universities. He said his Spanish language skills and experience in the EU, along with teaching experience, probably led to his appointment. Blanc has taught communications classes to Spanish- and English-speaking civil servants in Guadeloupe, as often as three times a year.

This spring, Blanc taught a seminar called "The New European Union Policy Agenda." He focused the course on policymaking in the European Union and the role of the supranational Court of Justice.
 

Eleanor Savage-Gildersleeve
Life in the Foreign Service is not only an exciting and varied real-world experience, but it occasionally borders on the surreal, says Eleanor Savage-Gildersleeve.

The State Department diplomat-in-residence at the LBJ School, Savage-Gildersleeve has been a member of the Foreign Service since 1964 and currently holds the rank of minister counselor in the Senior Foreign Service. She says one of the highlights of her career was serving as political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Panama in the mid-1980s.

"I was there when we (the U.S. government) did a 180-degree reversal on policy toward Noriega," she said. "The whole process of contributing to the change in that policy was quite surreal, like a soap opera--you never knew when Noriega might make you a star of the show."

In another interesting assignment, Savage-Gildersleeve served as chief U.S. negotiator for the Global Convention on Biological Diversity, a role she assumed through her position as director of the State Department's Office of Ecology, Health, and Conservation. The treaty, originally proposed by the United States as an "umbrella" convention to harmonize existing treaties on wildlife, changed its scope to be a "law of the sea for the land," as Savage-Gildersleeve put it. The United States frequently found itself at odds with other nations over a spectrum of issues, she said, ranging from protection of intellectual property rights to safety in genetic engineering. During her three-year incumbency, terms were hammered out that would be acceptable to all the countries involved.

"After all the smoke cleared, though," she said, "President Bush announced that he would not sign the treaty because it was 'fatally flawed.' However, President Clinton signed it shortly after taking office."

Over the years Savage-Gildersleeve has had many other assignments--as consul general in Montreal, Canada, and in Melbourne, Australia, for exampl--and she said each has been interesting in its own way. Part of her responsibility as diplomat-in-residence is to share her experiences with UT Austin students and to help those who are interested in Foreign Service careers to prepare for the written and oral exams. "I recently served as an assessor on the Foreign Service Board of Examiners," she said, "so I have a good feel for what is expected in the examining process."

One of the State Department's primary recruitment goals is to increase the number of minorities who enter the Foreign Service, said Savage-Gildersleeve. Because no affirmative action-type preferences can be given, the strategy is to increase the number of minorities who take the exam. UT Austin's diverse student population is one of the main reasons the State Department chose to send one of its nine fellows here, she said.

In addition to her recruitment activities, Savage-Gildersleeve taught a seminar on environmental diplomacy at the LBJ School this semester. Next year, during the second half of her tenure at the school, she plans to devote most of her time to recruitment and other outreach efforts on behalf of the State Department.

Comments to lbjwmast@uts.cc.utexas.edu