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 UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

ANN ARBOR

We are pleased to announce that the University has appointed Paul Courant, effective March 1st, 2007 .

Dr. Courant, who served as provost of the University of Michigan from 2002-2005, is the Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, professor of economics in LSA and professor of information in the School of Information. He also is a Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Library and Information Resources in Washington, D.C.

The author of half a dozen books and over sixty monographs and papers, Dr. Courant has written on a broad range of topics in economics and public policy, including tax policy, local economic development, gender differences in pay, housing, radon and public health, relationships between economic growth and environmental policy, and university budgeting systems. More recently his areas of research have included the economics of universities, the economics of libraries and archives, and the changes in the system of scholarly communication that derive from new information technologies. He has written that ideas must be made public to qualify as ideas just as art must take physical form in order to qualify as art, and has admonished scholars, saying, "If we can't retrieve what you have learned, you have violated your implicit scholarly oath."

Dr. Courant holds a BA in History from Swarthmore College (1968); an MA in Economics from Princeton University (1973); and a PhD in Economics from Princeton University (1974).