Governing/Managing Public and Civic Affairs

Francie Ostrower is a professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs and College of Fine Arts, director of the Portfolio Program in Arts and Cultural Management and Entrepreneurship jointly sponsored by the College of Fine Arts and the LBJ School, and a senior fellow in the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service. She is principal investigator of the Building Audiences for Sustainability Initiative: Research and Evaluation, a six-year study of audience-building activities by performing arts organizations commissioned and funded by The Wallace Foundation through grants totaling $4.3 million.

Prior to joining The University of Texas at Austin in 2008, Dr. Ostrower was senior research associate at the Urban Institute and prior to that a sociology faculty member at Harvard University. She has been a visiting professor at IAE de Paris/Sorbonne Graduate Business School and is an Urban Institute-affiliated scholar. She has authored numerous publications on philanthropy, nonprofit governance, and arts and cultural participation that have received awards from the Association for Research on Nonprofit and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) and Independent Sector. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Aspen Institute, among others. Recent professional activities include serving as a board member and president of ARNOVA and on the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly board, and the academic advisory committee of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Edwin Dorn teaches defense policy and courses about the relationship between race and immigration policy. He was dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs from 1997 to 2005. Prior to that, Dr. Dorn spent 20 years in Washington, DC, where he worked on civil rights and education policy in the Carter administration and served as undersecretary of defense (Personnel & Readiness) in the Clinton administration. During the 1980s, he was affiliated with two Washington think tanks: the Joint Center for Political Studies and the Brookings Institution.

A native Texan, Dr. Dorn graduated from The University of Texas at Austin (Phi Beta Kappa). After serving as an officer in the U.S. Army, he completed his Ph.D. at Yale University. His major publications include Rules and Racial Equality (Yale University Press) and Who Defends America? which he edited (Joint Center for Political Studies Press). He was an adviser to the PBS documentary "Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years." Dr. Dorn is chairman of the board of the Kettering Foundation and serves on the boards of the Institute for Defense Analyses and the Seton Family of Hospitals. He also participates in the Dartmouth Conferences, an ongoing series of "back channel" meetings between prominent citizens of the United States and Russia.