Athens, Ga. – Nils Hasselmo, immediate past president of the Association of American Universities and former president of the University of Minnesota, will deliver the 18th annual Louise McBee Lecture at the University of Georgia Oct. 20 at 11 a.m. in the UGA Chapel.
The lecture honors Louise McBee, former vice president for academic affairs at UGA and former Georgia state representative from Athens.
Hasselmo, whose lecture is titled “My Universities,” served from July 1998 until January of this year as president of the Association of American Universities, an organization composed of 60 U.S. and two Canadian public and private universities that have strong programs of research and graduate and professional education.
Prior to the AAU position, Hasselmo served 10 years as the 13th president of the University of Minnesota. He joined the UM faculty in 1965 and left in 1983 for the University of Arizona, where he was senior vice president for academic affairs and provost for five years before returning to UM in 1988.
A native of Sweden, Hasselmo is an authority on bilingualism and language contact and is author of books and articles on the Swedish language in America. He was a Fulbright-Hays scholar in Sweden and Iceland and has lectured and served in visiting appointments at Scandinavian universities.
While he was president of the University of Minnesota, Hasselmo served as chair of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the Big Ten Council of Presidents and the Minnesota Higher Education Advisory Council. He also has served on the board of the National Merit Scholarship Corp., the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Universities’ Research Association.
He has been president of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study and the Swedish-American Historical Society, and chairman of the Swedish Council of America.
Among his many honors are the Royal Order of the North Star, presented by the King of Sweden; King Carl XVI Gustaf’s Bicentennial Medal in Gold; and selection as Swedish-American of the Year by the Swedish government.
McBee was at UGA for 25 years, serving in a number of positions including dean of women, dean of students and acting vice president for academic affairs. Following her retirement in 1988, the University System’s Board of Regents named her vice president emerita for academic affairs.
She was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1991 and served six terms before stepping down in 2004. In her last term, she was chair of the House Higher Education Committee.
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