
In 1973, I was appointed by the United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.) and the Venezuelan government to create a Graduate School of Mathematics at La Universidad de Oriente in Cumaná, Venezuela. Under their aegis, I established a curriculum, stocked a library, hired a faculty of Spanish-speaking mathematics professors, and taught many of the courses, myself. The endeavor was evaluated by the School of International Education at the University of Pittsburgh by having the first graduating class of the Mathematics Graduate School at La Univ. de Oriente take their last semester of studies at the Univ. of Pittsburgh, and then pass the Masters Degree examinations from the Mathematics Dept. of the Univ. of Pittsburgh. The entire program was, and still is, an unqualified success.
A few years ago, the trustees of St. John's University decided that the University's old Core Curriculm was both dated and easy to circumvent. So they formed a Committee to create a new Core Curriculum. I was asked to be on the Committee because of my experience in Curriculum Design.