Dr. Gordon Lloyd Named the Robert and Katheryn Dockson Professor of Public Policy

Professor Gordon Lloyd has been appointed to be the first Robert and Katheryn Dockson Professor in the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy (SPP) beginning in the Fall 2014 term, combining two names that have been foundational in the history of the school. The very first commitment of a significant gift to encourage Pepperdine to start a public policy program came from Dr. Dockson who had been a long time member of the Pepperdine Board of Regents, as well as a member of then dean James R. Wilburn's advisory board at the School of Business and Management. Professor Lloyd, on the other hand, was the first faculty member to be recruited for the School of Public Policy in 1997, having taught in its first semester while on sabbatical from Redlands University where he had been a faculty member for many years. He became a part of the SPP full-time faculty in 1998.

Dr. Robert Dockson, following an impressive career as an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank and a professor himself at other universities, was the founding dean of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California before assuming his role as chair and CEO of California Federal Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in the nation. It was in the latter role that Dockson joined the Board of Regents at Pepperdine and helped to recruit some of Los Angeles' most prominent leaders to join him on the Pepperdine board at a time when Pepperdine, facing historic challenges in its move from South Los Angeles to its new Malibu home, was also beginning to emerge from among other smaller Southern California colleges to a position of higher visibility.

Before his passing, Dr. Dockson was aware of plans eventually to name Professor Lloyd to the Dockson Professorship and was very much aware of Professor Lloyd's career. Thus two leaders, each with an established reputation before they came to Pepperdine, shared in the dream of a School of Public Policy that would take its place among the nation's most highly respected graduate programs.

Gordon Lloyd earned his bachelor of arts degree in economics and political science at McGill University. He completed all the course work toward a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago before receiving his master of arts and PhD degrees in government at Claremont Graduate School. The coauthor of three books on the American founding and sole author of a book on the political economy of the New Deal, he also has numerous articles, reviews, and opinion-editorials to his credit. His latest coauthored book, The New Deal & Modern American Conservatism: A Defining Rivalry, was published in 2013, and he most recently released as editor Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 in September 2014. He is the creator, with the help of the Ashbrook Center, of four highly regarded websites on the origin of the U.S. Constitution. He has received many teaching, scholarly, and leadership awards including admission to Phi Beta Kappa and the Howard White Award for Teaching Excellence at Pepperdine University. He currently serves on the National Advisory Council for the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Presidential Learning Center through the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.