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PROFESSOR KEITH SHAW RECEIVES AN EMERITUS PROFESSORSHIP

"The dinner was arranged first and foremost to mark the importance of Professor Shaw’s outstanding academic contribution, but the long association of so many of the guests... made it very much an evening spent in the company of old friends"

Professor Martin Ricketts

Monday 11th August 2003

A dinner was held at the Villiers Hotel on Friday 1st August in honour of Professor Keith Shaw. Members of the Department of International Studies with their wives and partners, as well as other guests, gathered to pay tribute to Professor Shaw’s contribution to the University of over more than twenty years. Two other emeritus professors were present to welcome Keith into this exclusive club – Professor Alan Brook and Professor Mark Blaug who gave the after-dinner speech.

An academic, Professor Blaug remarked, was distinguished by his publications and he went on to remind the guests of Keith’s work in macroeconomics. In the 1970s Keith had written An Introduction to the Theory of Macroeconomic Policy (1971), Fiscal Policy (1972) and (with Alan Peacock – a past Vice-Chancellor and emeritus professor) The Economic Theory of Fiscal policy (1971). These works had been translated into many languages including Japanese, Italian, Spanish and Turkish. Of Keith’s later work, Professor Blaug drew particular attention to Rational Expectations (1984) and Keynesian Economics: The Permanent Revolution (1988). Of his many papers spanning four decades it was a suitable occasion to mention “The University of Buckingham after 10 Years: a Tentative Evaluation”, a joint paper that Keith and Mark had written in 1988 in Higher Education Quarterly . Buckingham then, as now, was a university outside the main state-funded sector, and Keith and Mark provided a detached and professional evaluation of its achievements up to that time. The award of an emeritus professorship was in recognition of the central role played by Keith Shaw in establishing the academic reputation of the fledgling University of Buckingham.

In his reply Professor Shaw emphasised the importance of the scholarly work done in the Department of Economics in the late 1970s and early 1980s which helped build the credibility of the University and thus buttressed its successful application for a Royal Charter. David Greenaway (now Professor of Economics at the University of Nottingham) also played a pivotal role in this effort and was present at the dinner.

Members of the Department (now the Department of Economics and International Studies) attending the dinner included Norman Barry, Martin Ricketts, Mike McCrostie and Malcolm Rees as well as Professor John Clarke (who was the University’s very first Admissions Tutor in 1975) and Linda Waterman (the Department’s Administrative Secretary). Dr Ruth Towse, Professor Blaug’s wife, and a well-known academic economist in her own right, was present. Nic Tideman and his wife Estil Putney also attended the dinner. Both have long associations with the University. Nic is Professor of Economics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and has visited Buckingham regularly over the last twenty years as both teacher and researcher. Dr Estil Putney taught a free choice option in Psychology at Buckingham in the 1980s.

The dinner was arranged first and foremost to mark the importance of Professor Shaw’s outstanding academic contribution, but the long association of so many of the guests, with Buckingham and with each other, as well as with Professor Shaw himself, made it very much an evening spent in the company of old friends.

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Report by Professor Martin Ricketts and the Web Team