LAFF Society

NEWSLETTER

In Memoriam, Summer 2014

 

Thomas G. Kessinger died July 7 in Annapolis, Md., after suffering a severe head injury while playing tennis two weeks earlier. He was 73.
 
Tom Kessinger started working for the Foundation in 1977 in New Delhi as a program officer in education and culture, responsible for work in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Two years later he became regional representative in Indonesia where he oversaw all programs in that country and in Thailand, Singapore and The Philippines. 
 
He returned to New Delhi in 1987 as the regional representative for South Asia, where he stayed until he was named president of Haverford College in 1988.
 
After eight years at Haverford he became general manager of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, in Geneva, where he managed a group of architects, conservation engineers, designers and city planners in activities designed to enhance the quality of the infrastructure in historic cities in Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. From 2002 until his retirement in 2012 he was general manager of the Aga Khan Foundation.
 
Tom served as chair of the Resource Development and Governance committees of the Board of Trustees of Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, before being named chairman pro tem of the board earlier this year.
 
His work in international development began when he became a Peace Corps volunteer in the Punjab, working in community development. He did his doctoral research in a village in India and worked in academia until joining the Foundation.
 
Tom Kessinger maintained his contacts with the Foundation until his death, including attending an informal gathering of friends and colleagues in Bangkok that was pictured in the last issue of the newsletter.
 
Gustav Ranis, an economist who worked for the Foundation in Pakistan and was an early and influential practitioner in the field of development economics, died last October.
 
(A brief note on his death that appeared in the last issue of the newsletter misspelled his name, which is given correctly here along with more details on his prominent role in overseas development work.) 
 
“He was one of the most brilliant members of the Foundation’s remarkable overseas development team,” said Willard Hertz, who worked in Pakistan for the Foundation after Ranis had left and later served as Ford’s assistant secretary. “While he worked for the Foundation for only three years, his role was pivotal in our Pakistan program and he subsequently became a pillar of the Yale University economics department and one of the founders of the field of development economics.”  
 
“Gus” Ranis wrote more than 20 books and 300 articles on theoretical and policy-related issues of development, especially as co-author, with John Fei, of the book Development of the Labor Surplus Economy: Theory and Policy, which led to new literature and debate in development economics. Their proposal, now known as the Ranis-Fei Model, analyzes the movement of population from substantive self-employed agriculture to a modern urban, industrial economy.
 
He was born in Germany but, as a Jew, left in 1941 with his mother and younger brother for Cuba and then the United States. He was valedictorian of the first graduating class of Brandeis University and earned both a master’s degree and doctorate in economics from Yale.
 
He went to work for the Foundation in 1956 as the assistant representative in Pakistan, where he helped create the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics in Karachi. Three years later he left Ford to become joint director of the institute, which still exists, notes Hertz, as a “world-class research and educational institution in an otherwise deeply troubled country.”
 
He joined the Yale faculty in 1960 as an assistant professor of economics and became the Frank Altschul Professor of International Economics in 1982, a position he held until he retired in 2005. At Yale he also served as director of the Center for International and Area Studies and of the Economic Growth Center, encouraging and coordinating teaching and research in international affairs, societies and cultures around the world. The center, now the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International Area Studies, presents the annual Gustav Ranis International Book Prize for the best book on an international topic by a Yale faculty member.
 
Over the years he served in several other capacities, most notably as personal economic adviser to the president of Ghana and as a consultant to, among many others, the United Nations, the World Bank, the Brookings Institution, the Pearson Commission, and the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. He was also a visiting professor or scholar at institutions in Japan, Colombia, Mexico and Germany.  
 
Henry P. Dart, Jr., who worked at the Foundation for nearly 20 years in various accounting positions, died last November at the age of 90 in Bethel, Conn.
 
He started at the Foundation in 1968 as manager of securities in the accounting unit. A decade later he became special projects coordinator in the comptroller’s unit and, in 1982, an adviser for special projects. He retired in 1984.
 
After three years of service in Europe during World War II in the medical detachment of the 87th Infantry Division, he resumed his studies at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., and earned a business degree as a member of the college’s first graduating class.
 
When his first son was born with Downs Syndrome he began a lifelong involvement with programs that help people with mental health problems. At the start he worked with two organizations, the Connecticut Association for Retarded Children (CARC) and the National Association for Retarded Children (NARC).
 
During the 1950s he was treasurer and then president of CARC and was asked by the state to serve as an advisor to a mental retardation planning project that developed a guide used in several other states. 
 
He also became budget chairman and, later, treasurer of the NARC.
 
Survivors include two children and three grandchildren. Two other children pre-deceased him.

 

 

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