Carnegie Corporation of New York is pleased to announce the appointment of two new program associates. They are Barbara Gombach, who recently joined the Education Division, and Courtenay Sprague, who recently joined the International Development Program.
Gombach will work across the education division's programs in higher education, urban school reform and early childhood education. "She hasnearly twenty years of experience in university administration and college teaching, which will be an asset to the education division's work in higher education," says Dan Fallon, chair of the Corporation's education division.
Before joining the Corporation, Gombach served for nearly five years as Assistant Dean at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs where she worked on faculty and curriculum matters for twoprofessional masters programs. Earlier she worked as Assistant Director of Columbia University's Southern Asian Institute, combining her academic interests in South Asia and the humanities with her administrative experience in a campus-wide multidisciplinary program in South Asian studies. While at Columbia, Gombach worked in several national networks for international studies that have been developed through U.S. Department of Education Title VI funding: National Resource Centers for Foreign Language and Area Studies, and the Centers for International Business Education. She has also taught courses in South Asian religions at Barnard College and Columbia University. Gombach holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University.
Sprague will be be working to strengthen a few carefully selected universities in sub-Saharan Africa, part of the International Development Program's focus on higher education in the area. Over the next ten years, the International Development Program (IDP) will support models that are designed to sustain specific institutional reforms within universities and spur other institutions in Africa to adapt and utilize the results. "Sprague's experience as an educator and researcher in South Africa has given her insights into the needs and constraints of African educational institutions which will be valuable to the Corporation's work," says Narciso Matos, chair of the International Development Program.
Most recently, Sprague was a lecturer and senior researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa for two years where she was instrumental in advancing the case method approach to teaching at the Graduate School of Business Administration. Sprague taught ethics and corporate social responsibility to MBA students and executives and developed a number of field-based South African cases that emphasized initiatives along critical social, economic and political lines, including managing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the workplace, utilizing partnerships between the public and private sectors to achieve water services delivery in rural regions and developing black economic empowerment schemes. Several of Sprague's cases are featured in two forthcoming publications of the International Labour Organization-a book entitled Competitiveness in the XXI Century: Social Dimensions of Corporate Success and an international case study collection.
Prior to her work in South Africa, Sprague was a research associate at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, where she worked closely with faculty members in the department of Business, Government and the International Economy to develop cases for the required M.B.A. curriculum. Sprague earned a B.A. degreein Political Science from Michigan State University and holds two M.A. degrees from Boston University-one in International Relations and the other in Resource and Environmental Management.
Carnegie Corporation of New York (www.carnegie.org) was begun by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 for the "advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding." As a grantmaking foundation, the Corporation seeks to carry out Carnegie's vision of philanthropy, which he said should aim "to do real and permanent good in the world." The Corporation's capital fund, originally donated at a value of about $135 million, had a market value of $1.9 billion on September 30, 2000. The Corporation expects to issue grants of $75 million this year in the areas of education, international peace and security, international development and strengthening U.S. democracy.