Departments & Faculty | Endowed Professorships
Lawrence Jepson was born in Denmark and immigrated to Iowa with his parents in the early 1900's. Early in life he served as a blacksmith's apprentice. Later he enrolled as a student at Iowa State Teachers College (now UNI) and, while an undergraduate, was instrumental in the creation of the Cedar Falls Chamber of Commerce. Upon leaving Cedar Falls, he became a Wall Street businessman who was keenly interested in how Iowa and the United States would fit into the emerging global economic framework.
In the development of the Keystone Mutual Fund, which he founded and ran until the late 1970's, Jepson learned that the U.S. was not an island in the world economy. He used to say that if a Zurich banker sneezed, someone in the United States caught a cold. In the 1970's, the U.S. felt little need for the rest of the world, other than oil. Lawrence Jepson knew otherwise. He was aware of the importance of global interrelationships well before it was fashionable to be so.
When Jepson died in 1982, he bequeathed funds to the UNI Foundation to establish the Lawrence M. Jepson endowment to create a professorship and support activities in the area of international economics. Over the years, thousands of students, faculty, business leaders and community representatives have benefitted from his generosity. The endowment has been used to finance symposiums, speakers, faculty development, and student scholarships.
Professor of economics Ken Brown currently holds the Lawrence Jepson Professorship. He teaches Decision Techniques, Econometrics, Urban and Regional Economics, Intermediate Microeconomic Theory, Principles of Microeconomics and Health Economics. Brown earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in economics from the University of Illinois and his B.S. in economics from Saint Louis University.
One of the activities of the Jepson Professorship is a bilateral student seminar on international business, an exchange program with the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics (PRAE) in Moscow. Each spring, teams of five students and at least one faculty adviser from each university present papers to their respective Russian or American peers for critique and discussion during two separate seminars - the first at UNI and the second at PRAE. Experiences such as these broaden the students' outlook and strengthen UNI's global connections.
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