Lucille Eckrich (Ph.D., SUNY Buffalo) has been active in the American Monetary Institute since 2005. She is an Associate Professor Emeritus at Illinois State University, where she taught in the College of Education 2001-2020. Her undergraduate degree was in African studies and economics from the College of Wooster in 1979, after which she worked in Botswana for three years and then did anti-apartheid and urban education work in Chicago until she started graduate school in 1990. She came to a critique of modern money through her 1998 dissertation on Value in Economics, Ethics, and Education. Her first publication on the topic was in 2004 entitled “The Inefficiency of the “Cult of Efficiency”: Implications for Public Schooling and Education.” In 2013 she co-authored “Ivory Tower Graduates in the Red: The Role of Debt in Higher Education,” and in 2017 she authored two chapters in a book she co-edited called The Neoliberal Agenda and the Student Debt Crisis in U.S. Higher Education. Those chapters and her 2013 article situate the student debt problem in the context of monetary critique and reform. Lucille is a founding member of AFJM, served on the Organizing Committee that led to its founding in July 2018, and has served as an officer and on numerous committees ever since. She lives in central Illinois, is married to a German cabinetmaker, and has three adult children, two grandchildren, and five siblings.
