Jim Cobbe is Professor of Economics at Florida State University, and for 2005-2007 was President of the Florida State University Faculty Senate.
If you are interested in my views on the Faculty Senate, you could read the "remarks" I made to the first meeting of the senate in Fall 2005, or read my interview with the FSView and Flambeau. If you want to see my personal views on State policy and quality of the State University System in Florida, you can see a piece I published in the Tallahassee Democrat here.
My office is in room 150A Bellamy Building, phone +1 850 644 7091.
My Background
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, before joining the faculty of FSU in
1976.
I have been based in Tallahassee ever since, although I went back to
Lesotho
for a year in the 1980s, and I have done short-term contract or
consulting
work in Africa, the Carribbean, Asia, and the Gulf. From 2000 to
2004, I was education economist for the European Union's Support
to the
Ministry
of Education and Training Project in Ha Noi, Viet Nam, and visited Viet
Nam
several times a year. I also worked on preparation of the
Targeted Budget Support for Education For All Implementation Project
for the World Bank in Viet Nam. I was selected for a Fulbright
grant for 2007-08, and spent the academic year in Viet Nam,
at Đại Học Kinh Tế Đà Nẵng.
. 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. 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. For a photo of me as an
undergraduate, look here.
If you really want to see it,
look here for my curriculum vitae.
A few things I've written recently, mostly on education in Viet Nam,
can be accessed here.