MacAvoy named Bates trustee

A Bates College alumnus has been named to the college’s Board of Trustees.

Paul W. MacAvoy of Woodstock, Vt., and New Haven, Conn., a 1955 Bates College graduate, was elected by trustees to an appointment on the Board of Overseers, filling a vacant position whose term expires in 2000.

MacAvoy, the Williams Brothers Professor of Management Studies at Yale University, was formerly Dean of the Yale School of Management. An adviser to three United States presidents, MacAvoy has been given credit (only “partially deserved,” he says) for inventing the term “voodoo economics” during the 1980 presidential campaign to describe Ronald Reagan’s policies.

MacAvoy is on the board of directors of Alumax, Inc.; Open Environment Corporation; and Lafarge Corporation. In his scholarly areas of interest, he has written 15 books and numerous articles.

MacAvoy majored in economics at Bates, graduating magna cum laude, and was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in economics. He received his master’s degree in 1956 and his doctoral degree in 1960, both in economics from Yale. In 1976, Bates awarded him the Doctor of Laws degree.

From 1976 to 1983, MacAvoy was the Steinbach Professor of Economics and Management, then Beinecke Professor of Economics, at Yale. In 1983, he became dean of the William E. Simon School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester, and in 1991 he returned to Yale as the Williams Brothers Professor of Management Studies, becoming dean of the School of Management in 1992.

MacAvoy was staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers for the Executive Office of the President in 1965-66; a member of the Presidential Task Force on Revision of the Antitrust Laws in 1967-68; a member of the National Petroleum Council in 1974-75 and from 1979 to 1981; and a member of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States in 1980-81.

He served on President Gerald Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1975 76 and chaired the subcommittee for government regulation and productivity of the President’s National Productivity Advisory Committee from 1982 to 1984.

MacAvoy has also been on the adjunct staff of the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute. President Reagan appointed MacAvoy to the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corporation board. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1776 as America’s honorary academic society and interdisciplinary studies center.

MacAvoy is married to Katherine Manning MacAvoy. They have two children.