Background information on the Fulbright-Kathryn and Craig Hall Distinguished Chair for Entrepreneurship in Central Europe

October 2001. The Austrian-American Educational Commission (AAEC), the binational organization responsible for managing the Fulbright Program in Austria, is pleased to announce that it has reached an agreement with Mr. Craig Hall to fund a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the future: the Fulbright-Kathryn and Craig Hall Distinguished Chair for Entrepreneurship in Central Europe. Mr. Hall is Chairman of Hall Financial Group (Dallas, TX) and the husband of Kathryn Walt Hall, the former U.S. Ambassador to Austria, who departed from Austria with her family to return to the U.S. in July 2001 after serving in Vienna for four years. Mr. Hall also was a member of the AAEC board. Mr. Hall has agreed to donate 50,000 Euro per annum for a five-year period to facilitate this Fulbright Distinguished Chair.

The Fulbright-Hall Distinguished Chair has been conceived as a regional grant that will entail the cooperation of the Austrian Fulbright Commission with binational Fulbright Commissions in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Slovak Republic. The Fulbright-Hall Distinguished Chair will "float" in the region and annually provide a U.S. scholar or expert on entrepreneurship with an opportunity to teach in the region for one semester. In order to facilitate a "regional presence" for the recipients of this grant, provisions also have been made of a discrete travel budget that is earmarked for lecturing in the region.

The Fulbright-Hall Distinguished Chair for Entrepreneurship in Central Europe is designed to address a broad spectrum of principle and regional issues related to entrepreneurship, including the relationships between public, private, and non-profit sectors; entrepreneurial strategies; the role of governments in facilitating individual initiative; economic and social entrepreneurship; and the theory of free market economies and economies in the process of transition or transformation to more mature market economies. Host commissions of this chair will be able to articulate which aspects of entrepreneurship are especially relevant to on-site circumstances on a case-by-case basis.

Mr. Hall completed a book titled The Responsible Entrepreneur (Career Press, 2001). He outlined his motives for his generous donation in the following manner: "As an author about entrepreneurship and an entrepreneur myself, I believe that responsible entrepreneurs make positive contributions to their respective societies. While my wife was U.S. Ambassador to Austria, I travelled and studied first hand the challenges that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe still face in their transition to free market economies. With this perspective, it is the belief of my wife and myself that having American entrepreneurship professors come to teach in the region can help spark new ideas for youth in Central and Eastern Europe. The reputation and the experience of the Fulbright Program make it an ideal partner for this kind of project."

The AAEC finds Mr. Hall's initiative noteworthy in a number of respects. Mr. Hall's contribution is exceptionally generous and will provide for correspondingly attractive grants. The Fulbright-Hall Chair was conceived as a regional grant and relates well to the forthcoming processes of the enlargement of the European Union. Furthermore, the Fulbright-Hall Distinguished Chair is a part of a personal diplomatic legacy that Ambassador Hall and Mr. Hall wished to leave upon their return to the United States.

A biographical note on Ambassador Kathryn Walt Hall.

A biographical note on Craig Hall.

The Austrian-American Educational Commission (Fulbright Commission) endeavors to update
the information on this site on a regular basis, but cannot guarantee its accuracy at all times.