This year's team of international visiting faculty brought unique experiences in global policies and public administration as well as valuable personal insights to LBJ School classrooms.

Increasingly recognized as a base for scholars of Latin America, the LBJ School hosted two visiting professors whose interests lie in this area. Two others, one from the European Commission and another a U.S. State Department diplomat-in-residence, brought varied perspectives from other countries.

Reginald Todd, who is this year's Distinguished Visiting Tom Slick Professor of World Peace, taught a seminar this spring called "Democratic Institution Building in Latin America." The course traced the history of democratization in Latin America and explored the underlying supposition that democracy is essential for achieving economic growth and promoting freedom, equality, and security in the region.

Todd has over 25 years' experience in developing and managing public- and private-sector programs. For the past seven years, he has worked in Central America coordinating USAID-financed legislative strengthening programs in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala, including the UT-Austin based Guatemalan Modernization Program.

Peter Spink, a visiting professor from the Brazilian Fundação Getulio Vargas, taught a course called "Citizenship and the Rights-based Approach to Public Administration." The course examined the role of the state and the effects of the conventional bureaucratic approach to public administration on the construction of practical citizenship.

Spink heads the Public Management and Citizen Program in the School of Business and Public Administration at the Fundação Getulio Vargas, which is located in São Paulo.

This year's European Commission Fellow, Alain Stekke, is the principal administrator in the directorate-general of the European Commission's Information Society, a post he has held since 1985. In this capacity he works in economic analysis, particularly in relation to the economics of the telecommunications regulatory framework in Europe.

Stekke, who is particularly interested in United States-European Union relations in the context of globalization and the post cold war era, taught seminars at the LBJ School this year on European integration and U.S.-European relations.

As a U.S. State Department diplomat-in-residence in her second year at the LBJ School, Eleanor Savage-Gildersleeve shared her experiences with UT Austin students and helped those who are interested in Foreign Service careers to prepare for written and oral exams.

A member of the Foreign Service since 1964, Savage-Gildersleeve holds the rank of minister counselor in the Senior Foreign Service. She has also been an assessor on the Foreign Service Board of Examiners, consul general in Canada and Australia, and director of the State Department Office of Ecology, Health, and Conservation in Washington, D.C. In the latter position she served as chief negotiator for the international treaty on biodiversity and was a member of the U.S. delegation to the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit).

Contents • Record Home • Publications • LBJ School

May 14, 2001

comments to: lbjwmast@uts.cc.utexas.edu