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Noted economist named
BGSU’s Master Teacher
BOWLING GREEN, O.--An internationally
known economist who believes the best teachers are themselves
lifelong learners has been named this year’s Master
Teacher at Bowling Green State University.
Dr. Timothy Fuerst, the Owens-Illinois
Professor in the Department of Economics, received the
$1,000 award at the annual Faculty Recognition Dinner.
The Master Teacher Award is sponsored
annually by the University’s Student Alumni Association
and is among the highest honors given to BGSU faculty.
The graduate student who nominated
Fuerst for the honor said she wasn’t especially interested
in economics before taking a required course he taught.
"On the first day of class
he told us that economics should be part of our lives,
that we should think about it all of the time. At the
time, I thought that sounded a little nutty. Over the
course of the semester, however, I did find myself
thinking about economics all of the time. Thanks to Dr.
Fuerst’s enthusiasm, I fell in love with economics,"
the student wrote.
Fuerst earned his doctorate in
economics at the University of Chicago, where his dissertation
chair was 1995 Nobel Prize-winner in economics Dr. Robert
Lucas. He first came to BGSU as an instructor during the
1989-90 academic year. He returned to Chicago and spent
three years teaching economics at Northwestern University’s
Kellogg Graduate School of Management before coming back
to BGSU as an assistant professor in 1993.
A member of the American Economics
Association, Fuerst also is a member of the Board of Editors
of the American Economic Review and serves as a consultant
for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. In 1999 he
was invited by the Central Bank of Chile to present his
work on inflation targeting at an international monetary
policy conference in Santiago along with faculty from
Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Ohio State universities.
Last January he traveled to Europe
at the invitation of the Central Bank of Portugal to teach
a week-long series of classes on monetary theory for regional
doctoral students and central bank staff from a number
of European countries.
When asked why he chose a teaching
career, Fuerst responded that it’s his passion for
economics. "It permeates all that I do. Life is about
choices and economics is largely about how societies make
choices," he said.
An active researcher, Fuerst says
that over the years the best teachers he has encountered
were invariably active, successful researchers.
"The most important characteristic
of a good teacher is to be a good role model, to be a
person excited and engaged in learning and discovering
new things. I get to do what I love to do–interact
with ideas–and I get paid for it. The research half
of my job is engaged in discovery, learning new things
about monetary policy and the business cycle, trying to
find better policies for the central bank to follow.
"It is important for the student
to see the teacher as a learner–a lifetime learner,"
he continued. "It may seem paradoxical, but a master
teacher is one who is constantly learning, and communicating
this passion for learning to his/her students." (Posted
10/16/2000)
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