Mark D. says, "2303 Marconi Ave.
St. Louis, Missouri 63110
August 10, 2012
August 18, 2012
To Whom It May Concern:
It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to write a letter of recommendation for Fred Hudson, an extraordinary thinker and doer who has had an extensive career of public and nonprofit service as a professional policy analyst.
I was on the urban policy analysis faculty of the New School for Social Research (1971-1975), when I first met Mr. Hudson when he joined our then new graduate program as a student. While he fit the profile we sought of an alumnus of a demanding undergraduate program with experience in community service (Mr. Hudson, for example, had been an aide to Erma Henderson, president of the Detroit City Council), he soon proved to be one of the smartest and most talented professionals in our field with great gifts for conceptualization, critical interpretation, and writing.
Our master's program was organized around both traditional and disciplinary based courses and also problem solving laboratories in which student groups learned about decisionmaking roles by applying the methods we taught to real public and nonprofit agency problems - our faculty and the agencies' decisionmaker clients together critiqued the analyses. This was an unusually collegial approach, and Mr. Hudson (both our student and soon-to-be professional practice colleague) was a leading thinker in our faculty/student community.
By the late 1970's, I had moved on to St. Louis to direct a 2nd new policy analysis professional education program at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. One of the earliest opportunities to hire faculty came with a limited term but multiyear federal faculty grant. So, I had the chance to hire Mr. Hudson to teach for us, primarily in the management and nonprofit curricular areas. He also directed a fellowship program for us to help install a new mayoral administration in East St. Louis in which our graduate students would assist different department administrators.
While the grant's time eventually ran out, Mr. Hudson was a wonderful intellectual addition to the faculty/student community during his time working with us - especially popular with our students who studied with him, a great colleague for our faculty members. Mr. Hudson, always accessible and available, was recognized for the originality and uniqueness of his insights into the policy problems we addressed.
While we have not had the occasion to work together recently, it has been a pleasure to keep up with Mr. Hudson's thinking and his ideas in the writing he has contributed. Actively involved in the community, he invariably has been generous and forthcoming in the advice and support he has continued to provide everyone he knows, people who consistently have been grateful for sharing experience with him.
Please feel free to contact me with any additional questions you might have. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and consideration in reviewing my comments about an individual I so much admire.
Sincerely yours,
Mark L. Drucker
Formerly Director, Graduate Program in Urban Policy Analysis
Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville
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