ATHENS, Ga. — Robert D. McTeer Jr., president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, will deliver two speeches next week for the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business, his alma mater.

On April 19, the Ranger, Ga., native will present the university's David McCord Wright Lecture, sponsored by the Economics Department, at 3:00 pm in the Law School Auditorium. McTeer is a former student of Wright's, who was an economics professor at UGA from 1962 until his death in 1968. The speech is titled "Growth Comes Through Change and Causes Change," a favorite saying of Wright's often repeated to his students. The lecture is free and open to the public.

McTeer also will be the featured guest at a sold-out "Terry Third Thursday" speech in Atlanta on April 20. He will give a talk on "The New Paradigm Economy." The breakfast meetings are held on the third Thursday of every month at the new UGA Alumni Club in the Atlanta Financial Center.

"As president of the Dallas Federal Reserve, McTeer participates in crucial decisions on U.S. monetary policy that are felt not only nationally but internationally," said Dwight Lee, who heads the Ramsey Center for Private Enterprise in UGA's Economics Department.

McTeer, who earned both a B.B.A. in finance and a Ph.D. in economics from UGA, said he was first introduced to the free enterprise system at his father's truck stop where he pumped gas and mopped the floors while working night shifts.

McTeer is known for his ability to translate economic sense into common sense in his speeches and published works. He has been described as the leader of "the free enterprise Fed."

Before joining the Dallas Fed in February 1991, he was senior vice president in charge of the Baltimore branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, which he joined in 1968 as a research economist and where he also served as an administrative officer and editor of the Economic Review.

As president and CEO of the Dallas Fed, McTeer is a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, in which he has voting privileges every third year. The FOMC is the principal monetary policy-making body of the Federal Reserve System. It meets every six weeks to determine monetary policy for the coming period.

While under McTeer's leadership, the Dallas Fed has become the Federal Reserve System's gateway to Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

He is a former president of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, a national association of holders of university chairs of free enterprise and other scholars who promote market solutions to public policy problems. He also has served as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Richmond, Virginia Commonwealth University, Johns Hopkins University, and several state and regional banking schools.

"For this particular lecture, we bring back former students of David McCord Wright who have achieved national prominence," Lee said. "Bob McTeer has certainly reached that place of importance and is himself an advocate of the free market lessons taught by Wright."

Wright was a leading academic economist in the 1950s and '60s. A native of Savannah, Ga., Wright received his doctorate from Harvard University, where he was a student of Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian statesman-scholar who wrote "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy." He was on the faculty at the University of Virginia and held several federal government advisory positions before joining the UGA faculty in July 1962.

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