Edward Robert Raupp - Biography
Edward Raupp has had three careers, all involving international relations, and mostly in developing and transitional nations. An Army officer for 20 years, he traveled widely throughout Europe and the Pacific, with service in post-war Korea and wartime Vietnam. He retired in 1979 as a full colonel.
As an international business executive, he developed strategic partnerships in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. As a professor of business and economics at Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa, he developed the semester in Oxford, England, where senior students studied, worked in supervised internships, and experienced living in another culture. He also initiated a recruiting program that brought more students from Tanzania to that college than were at any other institution of higher education in the United States and founded a campus of Waldorf College in Dar es Salaam, which today, as part of the Tumaini University system has over 2,000 students. He served as economics advisor to TAYOA, a non-government organization whose objective was to identify and create new job opportunities for unemployed youth in Tanzania. He is a Board Trustee of the Independent University of Tanzania.
Having retired from three careers, he served for three-and-a-half years as a Peace Corps Volunteer at Gori State University in post-Soviet Georgia, and received from that university the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa. He also taught English and Economics at Tskhinvali State University, where he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Honour, and assisted in the founding of The University of Georgia, where he was Chancellor and Professor of Economics before assuming the presidency of Batumi International University. He was a Board Trustee of Gori University, which resulted from the merger of Gori State University and Tskhinvali State University. He earned his B.S. degree at Carnegie Mellon University, M.B.A. at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, M.A. in English Language and Literature at the University of Minnesota, and Ph.D. in Economics at The University of Georgia, where he is now Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Economics and member of the Board of Trustees. He is author of 15 books and numerous articles and the only American ever inducted into the Georgian Council of Writers.
Dr. Raupp retired to St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands, where he earned his certification in 2009 as an Advanced Open Water Diver from the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI). He came out of retirement in 2011 to return to Georgia, where he was Visiting Professor and Vice President of Caucasus University in Tbilisi. In 2012-2013, he was Visiting Professor at Stefano Moshi Memorial University College in Kilimanjaro Region, Tanzania. He now teaches economics courses online for Great Bay Community College in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA, and he teaches English Language and Literature courses at Gori State Teaching University in Gori, Georgia. He is married to the former Danna Hilary Vance; the couple is at home in Gori.