Paul Courant

Profile Updated: April 19, 2023

Spouse/Partner, children, grands and steps:	Married to Marta Manildi, 1988, Children Ernest b.1973, Noah 1978, Sam 1989. Grands Talia 2009, Konstantin 2015, Ivan 2017.

More about Spouse/Partner or Special Friends:	Marta is an attorney and we both had professional interests in taxes, she helping clients with estate More…

Your personal or professional website:	www-personal.umich.edu/~pnc/

Career History:	I taught at the University of Michigan pretty much steadily from 1973 until 2020. I've also done quite a lot of administration, including department chair, dean, provost, and university librarian

City and State:	Ann Arbor, MI USA

Education History since Swarthmore:

MA, Ph.D in economics at Princeton

I had majored in history and did not expect to become an economist, but my honors examiner in macroeconomics offered me a job at the Brookings Institution, where he worked. I found out that I enjoyed the combination of economics and public policy, and so I went to graduate school and lived more or less happily ever after.

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Open Category for Whatever you want to tell about yourself:

It is unusual for an economist to become the director of a university library. As library director I became involved with creating and developing digital libraries. This proved to be fun, and, I think, useful.

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Favorite memory from Swarthmore years:

General memory of finding interesting people with interesting things to say about many things. There was always a conversation worth overhearing. I also partook of what came to be known as the drug culture, but rather timidly compared to some of our classmates. Mostly, though, it was the people and the ideas, which continued to be the case for the next fifty-odd years.

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