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Emeritus Professor William Moskoff
Former Betty Jane Schultz Hollender Professor of Economics and Biology

Office: Reid 2008
Phone: 847-735-6091
Email: moskoff@lakeforest.edu

Rare among the attributes of the professors who have served at Lake Forest College, William Moskoff's professional authority in two wider different fields is reflected in the title he bore at the time of his retirement. Betts Jane Hollender Professor of Economics and Biology. Having gained an international reputation for his scholarly work in the economics of the Soviet Union. Professor Moskoff elected late in his career to turn his attentions to the discipline of ornithology, and he amassed a publishing record on the study of birds that rivaled his earlier bibliography in economics.

He was horn in New York City, where, in 1962, he took his undergraduate degree from Hunter College, with a concentration in economics, the field he pursued professionally. He followed the same discipline in graduate school, earning an M.A. in 1965 and a Ph.D. in 1970, both from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He taught briefly at Lake Forest College from 1970 to 1972, returning in 1983 to assume the chair of the Department of Economics and Business, which he built into one of the College's strongest majors. At the personal level, he recalled his teaching experience as unsurpassed among his professional satisfactions, a memory witnessed by his winning the Sears Roebuck Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership in 1991.

Nevertheless, Professor Moskoff was tirelessly devoted to research, as his publications attest. In the field of economics, he wrote four books, one of which, The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR During World War II, remains a major study of the subject. His list of articles is of similar substance. Moreover, for five years he served as the editor of Comparative Economic Studies, one of the two most important journals in that field.

Nor did his commitment to learning end there. In the late 1990s he turned his attentions to ornithology, earning an M.A. from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 1997, and going on to teach the subject at the College and to publish as vigorously as he had earlier in economics. Even his avocational interests bore fruit. He was a stamp collector, as several articles for The American Philatelist and The Chronicle of Higher Education bear out.