The University of Southern California announced the largest single gift ever for one of its ... [+]
The University of Southern California (USC) has received a $15 million gift for its Department of History from Elizabeth Van Hunnick, an alumna of USC. The university described the donation as the largest single gift ever for any of its humanities departments.
The gift will be used to:
- Endow three faculty chairs,
- Establish a $2 million faculty research fund,
- Create a $1 million graduate student fellowship.
The three new chairs will be named for Van Hunnick, her late father and her sister: the Elizabeth J. Van Hunnick Endowed Chair in History; the Garrett Van Hunnick Endowed Chair in History; and the Wilhelmina Van Hunnick Endowed Chair in History.
And in recognition of the gift, USC will name the department the “Van Hunnick History Department.”
“Elizabeth Van Hunnick’s generosity to our history department speaks to her passion for the humanities and history scholarship, as well as their importance at a research university like USC,” said USC President Carol L. Folt in the school’s announcement. “With this gift, she is ensuring new opportunities for both faculty and students whose scholarship rigorously examines and illuminates the history that shapes our communities and our world.”
This is not the first gift that Elizabeth Van Hunnick has made to USC’s history department. In 2016, her donation established the Garrett and Anne Van Hunnick Chair in European History, named in honor of her late parents. That chair is held by Professor Anne Goldgar, an expert on the history of early modern Europe, with a specific emphasis on the Netherlands and Francophone cultures.
USC claimed that when the Van Hunnick gifts were combined, they constituted one of the largest endowment contributions to any U.S. university department of history.
Jay Rubenstein, professor of history and chair of USC’s history department, described the gift as “astonishing,” adding “our faculty and graduate students will be able to conduct research at even higher levels of sophistication and ambition than we ever have in the past.”
Van Hunnick said she hoped her gift would help advance the prominence of the history department. “I am encouraged by the fact that we’ll have an outstanding history department, hopefully known nationwide and attracting many prominent scholars. That’s important because you can see what’s happening in the world today; you see leaders and politicians making the same mistakes over and over again.”
Van Hunnick’s parents emigrated to the United States from the Netherlands in the 1920s. Although the demands of their dairy farm business in Cypress, California precluded them from pursuing higher education, they emphasized the importance of learning for their daughters, Elizabeth and Wilhelmina, both of whom graduated from USC.
Van Hunnick said she grew up learning about European culture and history and traveling often to Europe, a passion she’s continued throughout her life. “I agree with the Greeks that in order to be a well-educated person you should study many, many different things,” she said. “It’s not just taking a course to get a job. That’s fine, but it’s important to be, I guess the old-fashioned term is ‘well-rounded.’”
