<p>Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist, will deliver the ninth annual Casey Shearer Memorial Lecture at Brown University on Tuesday, March 31, 2009. His talk, titled “Equal Play: Title IX and Public Policy,” will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching, De Ciccio Family Auditorium.</p>

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Sports economist Andrew Zimbalist will deliver the ninth annual Casey Shearer Memorial Lecture on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, at 6:30 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching, De Ciccio Family Auditorium. The presentation, titled “Equal Play: Title IX and Public Policy,” is free and open to the public.

The lectureship, sponsored by Brown University and the Goldway/Shearer family, was established in memory of Casey Shearer, a promising young writer and aspiring sportscaster who died in May 2000, days before he was to graduate from Brown. Previous speakers have included Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg, ESPN anchor Chris Berman, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, ABC analyst Cokie Roberts, Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell, Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, and film director Davis Guggenheim.

Prior to the lecture, the winners of the annual Casey Shearer Memorial Award for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction will be announced.

Andrew Zimbalist

Andrew Zimbalist is the Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics at Smith College and one of the most prominent sports economists in the nation. He is also a scholar of Latin American economics. Zimbalist has published 18 books, most recently The Bottom Line: Observations and Arguments on the Sports Business (2006) and, with Nancy Hogshead-Makar, Equal Play: Title IX and Social Change (2007). He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Sports Economics and has consulted extensively in the sports industry and in economic development. He was editor of a book series, “The Political Economy of Development in Latin America,” for Westview Press from 1987 through 1994 and chaired the Latin American Scholars Association’s Task Force on Scholarly Relations with Cuba from 1992 through 1994.

Zimbalist has consulted in Latin America for the United Nations Development Program, the Atlantic Council, IRELA, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. He has also served as a consultant to many legal proceedings involving professional and college sports and was named one of America’s Top 100 Most Influential Sports Educators by the Institute for International Sport.

Zimbalist received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1969 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972 and 1974, respectively. He has been in the economics department at Smith since 1974 and has been a visiting professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, and the University of Geneva, and a visiting research fellow at Harvard University. 

Casey Shearer

Casey Shearer, a member of the Class of 2000, was a vibrant and talented member of the Brown community. An economics concentrator, he also studied Spanish, political science and literature, and helped revive Brown Student Radio (WBSR). He was best known on campus as the station's play-by-play sports announcer and as the author of the weekly sports column “On the Case,” published in the College Hill Independent.

Shearer was born and raised in Santa Monica, Calif., where his mother, Ruth Goldway, once served as mayor. He graduated from high school in Finland, where his father, Derek Shearer, an Occidental College professor, served as U.S. ambassador. A top student at Brown, Shearer was a member of the economics honor society and received his magna cum laude pin the Friday before he was to graduate. That same day, during a regular pick-up game of basketball, Shearer's heart stopped and he collapsed. Four days later, he died of an undetected heart virus, two months before his 22nd birthday.