Board of Trustees 

William M. Arnold

Bill Arnold has held executive positions in the energy industry, government, and banking.   

He is Director, International Government Relations, of Shell Oil Company, with offices in Washington, D.C. and Houston. In more than a decade with Shell, he has served on the boards of numerous overseas subsidiaries.  

He has been an international commercial banker, as well as Senior Vice President of the Export Import-Bank of the United States. He represented the United States at Paris Club international debt rescheduling meetings and was liaison with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

He has been a Governor of the Middle East Institute in Washington for fifteen years; a Director of the Asia Society (Houston); The Houston Grand Opera; and a member of the Executive Committees of the Houston Committee on Foreign Relations and the Mexican Center of the University of Texas at Austin.  He previously served on the boards of directors of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, The University of Texas Health Science Center, The American Turkish Council, The American Red Cross (Houston Chapter), and the Houston World Affairs Council.

He is past Chairman of Amigos de las Americas, an international youth organization that has fielded more than 25,000 volunteers for health and social development projects in Latin America. He was a volunteer in Central America during the summers of 1965-1967. 

He served as a lead advance representative for George H. W. Bush, the 41^st President of the United States, in his first presidential campaign in 1980 and again in the 1992 election.  

He has been a lecturer on international affairs at the U.S. Army War College, the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, Texas A&M University, and other institutions. He participated in a commission at the National Academy of Science, mandated by the U.S. Congress to review and make recommendations on all US-government funded international studies and language programs, including the Fulbright Hayes Program. The study will be published in March 2007. 

A graduate of Cornell University in economics, he completed ad­vanced studies on European economic integration at the University of Amsterdam in the Nether­lands. At The University of Texas (Austin) he received an M.A. in Latin Ameri­can Studies, and an M.B.A. in International Finance. He completed programs at the Graduate School of Banking at the University of Wisconsin, and the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University. 

He is married to Catherine Anthony Arnold, a banker who serves on the boards of Amigos de las Americas (International) and the Park People (Houston). They have a daughter and son-in-law, Elizabeth and Richard Dennis, who are bankers in New York.