124 FORMER MTSU PROFESSOR WINS 2006 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Oct. 13, 2006
EDITORIAL CONTACT: Gina Logue, 615-898-5081

Bangladeshi Humanitarian Uplifted His Poverty-Stricken Nation

(MURFREESBORO) – The Norwegian Nobel Committee today announced that the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize will go to a former MTSU professor, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, and his brainchild, Grameen Bank.
Yunus was an assistant professor of economics at MTSU from 1969 to 1972. He was hired by Dr. Hans Mueller, department chair from 1969-1973, immediately upon his graduation with a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1969.
“I needed somebody around to ask questions on economic theory, and Yunus was always on the cutting edge,” Mueller recalls.
A colleague of Yunus, Dr. Kiyoshi Kawahito, says Yunus was “scholarly and a global thinker. He also had a good sense of humor.” Kawahito, an associate professor of economics and finance and director of MTSU’s Japan-U.S. Program, says he had to swap classes with Yunus on his first day of teaching with only one hour’s notice.
Yunus, a pioneer in the field of microcredit in his native Bangladesh, were lauded by the Nobel committee “for their efforts to create social and economic development from below,” according to www.nobelprize.org. “Loans to poor people without any financial security had appeared to be an impossible idea. From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed micro-credit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty.”
Yunus started by lending $27 to a group of 42 people in 1976 to help them purchase weaving stools. By using the weaving stools to improve their economic status, the borrowers repaid Yunus in short order. From this humble start, Grameen Bank was created. According to www.grameen-info.org, the institution offers credit to “the poorest of the poor” without demanding collateral.
Mueller notes that this was a revolutionary concept when it was introduced because the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were bankrolling huge projects which never really seemed to do much for poverty-stricken areas of the world.
“This was the opposite approach, beginning with very small incentives,” Mueller says. “These people really wanted to work. They just needed to get started.”

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Mueller, who regularly lunched with Yunus, remembers him as being a very warm person.
“He was very serious when he talked about serious things. He was well-read and could talk well about many different things,” Mueller says.
As a teacher at MTSU, Yunus specialized in both macroeconomic theory and microeconomic theory, a combination which is rare in today’s economics professors, Mueller says.
Dr. Billy Balch, professor emeritus, economics and finance from 1964 to 1998, says Yunus was “a very likable person” and “a very professional person, very intelligent. Although he wasn’t the type of person who socialized very much with other faculty, he was very studious and a very hard worker. I’m not surprised that he has succeeded.”
While at MTSU, Yunus also engaged in some on-campus activism, Mueller notes. Outraged by the actions of the ruling dictatorship in Pakistan, Yunus posted political cartoons around campus calling for support for the creation of an independent Bangladesh, perhaps foreshadowing his future work.
“I do remember I had a great respect for him and was not surprised when I learned later that he was very successful in his home country,” Balch adds. “I thought very well of the fact that he had returned to his home country to help in its economic and social conditions. I was pleased to have known him, and I think he represents MTSU very well.”
Yunus is the second professor associated with MTSU to win the prestigious Nobel Prize. James M. Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 “for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making,” according to www.nobelprize.org. Buchanan, a Murfreesboro native who earned his bachelor’s degree from what was then known as Middle Tennessee State College in 1940, is General Director of the Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.


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ATTENTION, MEDIA: To arrange interviews with former MTSU colleagues of Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, call the Office of News and Public Affairs at 615-898-2919.