Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A key administrator with the Washington, D.C.,-based Cato Institute is helping inaugurate a new speaker series at Mississippi State.
Mark A. Calabria, the institute's director of financial regulation studies, will be on campus Nov. 16 as featured guest for the Jack R. Lee Chair of Financial Institutions and Consumer Finance Speaker Series.
Free and open to all, his presentation begins at 3 p.m. in the McCool Hall Atrium.
The new series has been established in the university's College of Business by alumnus Francis C. "Franc" Lee, president and CEO of Flowood-based First Tower LLC. The program is a continuing memorial to Lee's late father, who purchased Jackson-based Tower Loan in the early 1970s and led in making it both the largest Mississippi-based consumer finance company and a multi-state corporation.
Franc Lee, a 1989 banking and finance graduate now residing in Brandon, is the MSU business college's 2012 alumnus of the year. The company he now heads operates nearly 170 branches in Mississippi, Louisiana and Missouri.
Calabria, the featured speaker, is a doctoral graduate of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Prior to joining the Cato Institute in 2009, he was a member of the senior professional staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking and Urban Affairs. Earlier, among other positions, he was deputy assistant secretary for regulatory affairs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Founded in 1977, the institute is a public policy research organization--a "think tank," in everyday terms--"dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace." Its scholars and analysts such as Calabria regularly conduct independent, nonpartisan research on a wide range of policy issues.
For more information on the program, contact professor Thomas W. Miller, holder of the Jack R. Lee Chair of Financial Institutions and Consumer Finance, at 663-325-2341 or twm75@msstate.edu.