of global changes

In final lecture, Lawton cites shifts in world economies

By BENNETT HALL

Gazette-Times business editor

Since Steve Lawton began teaching at Oregon State University in 1975, the world has changed politically, technologically and, perhaps above all else, economically.

"We were complaining about Japan," Lawton said Thursday in a farewell address to the campus community, recalling a time when that nation was seen as a looming threat to American prosperity.

"Now we're complaining about China," he continued. "It's going to be India in the next decade."

Lawton, an assistant professor of international business, is retiring after 31 years at the university. On Thursday afternoon more than 200 students, colleagues and friends gathered in the clubby confines of the Memorial Union Lounge to hear his reflections on three decades of change on campus and around the world.

"For one thing," he said, "when I received my job offer, it was by telegram."

Course materials were printed on mimeograph machines, students registered for classes using punch cards, and football fans were complaining about the Beavers' fifth straight losing season.

"The Beaverton high-tech corridor was a dream," Lawton continued. "It was just bare cornfields."

On the world stage, the United States was still locked in a cold war with the Soviet bloc, Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain, China was isolated by its own Cultural Revolution and India was a closed economy.

But suddenly, he said, "things changed - the major drivers of the global economy kicked in."

Among those he counted advances in computers, improvements in telecommunications and the development of containerized shipping, allowing companies to disperse their manufacturing and supply chain operations throughout the world.

Those drivers accelerated in the late '80s and early '90s, when Japan's bubble economy burst, the Berlin Wall came down and Western nations embraced the notion of free trade.

"Every developed economy in the world said we will all benefit from globalization," Lawton said.

The result was an economic boom, but there's also been a backlash. Protests and offshoring have led to widespread questioning of the global economy, and Lawton said he has his own "grave concerns." Chief among them is the ever-growing disparity between rich and poor.

"The wealthiest 225 individuals in the world," he said, "their annual income equals that of probably half of humanity."

Today, Lawton warned, America is losing its economic edge.

With 25 member nations, he said, the European Union now has a larger economy than ours. The emerging economies of the world are growing at a tremendous rate, and China recently surpassed the United States for the first time in foreign direct investment.

"Sixty-six percent of the exports coming out of China are coming out of foreign-owned factories," he noted. "India and China continue to attract FDI - and our jobs."

As a result, he said, foreign students graduating from OSU are returning to their home countries to start companies rather than going into business here, a trend Lawton said is made worse by the Patriot Act and America's terrorism-fueled fixation on security.

"We have to remember this is a reverse brain drain that's going to hurt us in the long run because we are a nation that's made up of immigrants."

Lawton's talk was the first in what's being billed as an annual "Last Lecture" series sponsored by the Memorial Union Program Council.

Don Johnson, the student union's assistant director, said the council will select a retiring faculty member each year to deliver a parting address in the MU Lounge, where the whole campus community will have the chance to hear it. Transcripts and DVDs of the talks will be archived.

"The content wouldn't necessarily be in their area," Johnson said. "It could be anything they wanted to say to the university."

Lawton was an easy choice to give the inaugural talk in the series, Johnson said. His junior-level International Business course is a requirement for business and a number of other majors, with more than 200 undergrads enrolled each term, making Lawton one of the best-known professors at OSU.

"He's sort of an icon on campus in the world of teaching," Johnson said. "He's highly respected by students."

Though he's officially retiring, the 55-year-old Lawton said he's entertaining job offers from other universities as well as the corporate world.

And he will continue to teach part-time at OSU.

"It's a nice way to begin to disengage from the university," he said. "It'll also reduce my withdrawal symptoms from my students."

On Thursday, some of his final words were addressed to his current and former students, many of whom were in attendance. He left them with the hope that they would always continue to learn.

"Teaching is not about filling a bucket, it's about lighting a fire," he said, quoting Yeats. "I've always thought my goal was to light a fire in your belly."

Bennett Hall is the business editor for the Gazette-Times. He can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.