Lynton K. Caldwell - Academic Career and Public Service

Academic Career and Public Service

From 1944-1947 he was director of research and publications for The Council of State Governments in Chicago. In 1947 he was appointed professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. In 1952 and 1953 he was part of U.N. sponsored missions in public administration in Colombia, the Philippines, and Japan. His next one-year U.N. appointment was as co-Director of the Public Administration Institute for Turkey and the Middle East in Ankara, Turkey. Indiana University then appointed him director of the Institute of Training for Public Service and Coordinator of Indonesian and Thailand Public Administration Programs. By the time of his retirement, further appointments, research and lecture tours and vacations had enabled him to visit nearly one hundred countries around the world as well as every state in the union. In 1956, after a year as visiting professor of government at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Bloomington as Professor of Government at Indiana University, where he remained until his retirement. In the course of his career he secured 21 National Science Foundation grants to support his research.

During his career, Caldwell served on the faculties of the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Oklahoma, Syracuse University, and the University of California at Berkeley, and had shorter appointments at some 80 other collegiate institutions both within the U.S. and overseas. At various times, Caldwell served as advisor or consultant to the U.S. Senate, UNESCO, the United Nations, the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Defense, and Interior, and the National Institutes of Health. Although not a natural scientist, as part of his work towards establishing interdisciplinary study in universities and achieving a greater merging of the two worlds of science and public policy, he became deeply involved in national and international environmental affairs and worked closely with several important scientific bodies serving, among many appointments, on the Sea Grant Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the first Environmental Advisory Board of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the Pacific Science Congress, the President’s National Commission on Materials Policy, the Science Advisory Board for the Great Lakes of the International Joint Commission, as chair of the first Commission on Environmental Policy, Law and Administration for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), and as advisor to the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB), and the UNESCO working program for the environmental education and training of engineers.

He also served on the editorial boards of numerous prestigious scientific and professional journals. A lover of nature, bird watching, and botany from an early age, he was a founding member of the South Bend, Indiana chapter of the Audubon Society, and of both the first local chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in New York, and the Conservancy's Indiana Chapter. He served on the Board of Governors of TNC from 1959 to 1965.