By Faith Peppers
University of Georgia
Jack E. Houston Jr., a University of Georgia professor of
agricultural marketing, received the 2004 D.W. Brooks Award for
Excellence in International Agriculture Oct. 18 in Athens, Ga.
The award includes a framed certificate and $5,000 cash.
Houston has been teaching agricultural and applied economics at
UGA since 1984. Before joining the university, he studied at
Washington State University and from 1967 to 1969 served as a
Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi.
He then spent nine years with the Malawi Ministry of Agriculture,
training more than 2,000 agricultural extension service
personnel. He was responsible for planning and developing the
curriculum of a new national college of natural resources.
Houston began curriculum changes for agriculture, forestry, home
economics, fisheries, veterinary science, hydrology and wildlife
management.
International impact
Since arriving at UGA, Houston has served as the interim director
of the African studies program. He developed the proposal to
advance the program into a university-wide Institute of African
Studies in 2001.
Houston has co-authored two successful U.S. Department of
Education grants for internationalizing curriculum across the
campus. He directs his department’s first study-abroad course,
the International Agribusiness Marketing and Management course
takes at the University of Veracruz, Mexico.
As one colleague says, “Having lived and worked in foreign
environment, he has a grasp of the challenges his students will
face on returning to home countries and therefore is capable of
giving them effective, useful counsel. Such alums are an asset
both to the University of Georgia and the United States.”
Other winners
Other Brooks honorees this year were Debbie Purvis, county
extension programs; Jeffery Dorfman, teaching, Bill Hurst,
extension and Paul Bertsch, research.
The Brooks teaching award was first given in 1981. Two years
later, the awards were expanded to include research, extension
and county extension programs. An award for international
agriculture was added in 1988 and is given in even-numbered years.
Before the awards ceremony, Mark Drabenstott delivered the D.W.
Brooks Lecture, “The Brave New World for Land-grant
Universities.” Drabenstott is vice president and director of the
Center for the Study of Rural America at the Federal Reserve Bank
of Kansas City.
The lecture and awards are named for the late D.W. Brooks,
founder of Gold Kist, Inc., and Cotton States Mutual Insurance
Companies. Brooks was an advisor on agriculture and trade issues
to seven U.S. presidents.
(Faith Peppers is a news editor with the University of Georgia
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)
