Donors invest more than $10.3 million in CLASS

The College’s supporters give to help students and faculty achieve excellence

The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences has been the recipient of unprecedented community generosity and enthusiasm, raising more than $10.3 million for the 2012 fiscal year that ended August 31.

Donors invested in the College for a variety of reasons including to champion student success, honor loved ones, support academic innovation and encourage artistic endeavors.

Gifts – ranging from graduates making a contribution by purchasing Spirit Cords worn with caps and gowns during Commencement to the Houston Endowment’s $1.5 million grant for the UH Arts Initiative – allow CLASS to expand its academic offerings and help students get the most out of the College.

Alumni and other supporters of the college were inspired by UH students and their capacity for excellence. Their giving enabled CLASS to provide more targeted funding to student success efforts, such as scholarships and new programs in interdisciplinary studies, critical thinking and writing.

Faculty and staff are also major investors in student excellence, such as the Department of Health and Human Performance, which started a new scholarship fund for undergraduate students with individual donations from faculty and staff.

CLASS also was honored to receive gifts saluting the teaching and expertise of its faculty, as well as endowments established as ongoing testaments to the good works of deceased members of the College or departed loved ones of CLASS supporters.

CLASS strives to provide students with an academic foundation that expands their thinking and broadens their life experiences. Philanthropists, large and small, affirmed those efforts with grants and gifts designed to enrich the College’s academic programs and artistic endeavors. The following represents a partial list of donors who supported our efforts this past year with gifts.

Student success

• Richard and Sue Shirley Howard established a Tier One Endowed Scholarship to benefit CLASS students.
• Sam Davis set up the Rick Casey Endowed Scholarship for Excellence in Journalism to encourage students to seek and report the truth as retired columnist Casey did at the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News.
• Ugo di Portanova continued to fund undergraduate scholarships for Italian majors and also established the Ugo di Portanova Endowed Scholarship in Italian Studies, benefitting students earning master of art degrees in World Cultures and Literatures.

Honor and remembrance

• Nkechi Eke established the Princess Chinwendu Eke Memorial Endowed Scholarship in Health and Human Performance in remembrance of her daughter, a CLASS alumna and HHP major.
• Beverly Kaufman, the former elected Harris County Clerk, created the Julius Kaufman Tier One Endowed Scholarship to honor her deceased husband.
• Robert and Jennifer Reichek honored Dr. James Pipkin for being an outstanding teacher by endowing a scholarship to provide financial assistance to students in the Department of English.

Academic innovation

• BB&T Charitable Foundation awarded $1 million to the Hobby Center for Public Policy to create new programs, a new lecture series and a summer training institute in social science research methods for graduate and undergraduate students interested in varying public policy perspectives.
• The Arab-American Educational Foundation, Inc. established an endowment to fund a chair in Modern Arab History in the Department of History.
• The John O’Quinn Foundation granted $100,000 to the Writing Center to support an initiative designed to assist graduate students completing their dissertations.

Artistic endeavors

• Houston Endowment awarded the UH Arts initiative $1.5 million to assist with enhancements to UH’s arts facilities, provide resources for ongoing and new public programs and establish a new academic program dedicated to arts leadership.
• The Cullen Trust awarded $1.5 million and the Brown Foundation awarded $175,000 to support renovations of the Wortham Theatre and a redesign of the Grove area in the arts district. 
• The Blaffer Art Museum’s renovation success continued with gifts from Miguel Loya, Sallie Morian and Mike Clark, The Wortham Foundation and the W.T. and Louise Moran Foundation.