A Conversation on the National Debt
Erskine Bowles
Thursday, 13 Sep 2012 at 8:00 pm – Great Hall, Memorial Union
Erskine Bowles is President Emeritus of the University of North Carolina, where he served as president for five years. Previously, he served in the Clinton Administration as director of the Small Business Administration and then as the President's Chief of Staff. In that role, he helped negotiate the first balanced federal budget in a generation. Bowles later became United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to coordinate the global response to the catastrophic tsunami that struck Southeast Asia in 2004. During his last year as UNC president, he was appointed by President Obama to co-chair, along with Alan Simpson of Wyoming, a bipartisan national commission on how to improve the country's fiscal health. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform's recommendation of tax increases and spending cuts have been praised by many but have made little progress in a divided Congress.Erskine Bowles has an undergraduate business degree from the University of North Carolina and an MBA from Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He began his business career at Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York, but returned to North Carolina, where he helped launch the investment banking firm of Bowles Hollowell Conner. He also helped found Dogwood Equity, chaired the Rural Prosperity Task Force, and served as a trustee of the Golden LEAF Foundation- three entities designed to bring economic development to rural North Carolina. Family illness inspired him to help lead efforts to create an ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) Center in Charlotte and to serve as the international president of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Cosponsored By:
- Presidential Installation Planning Committee
- Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
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