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Private contributions are critical to the College’s continued excellence and have a major impact on the University and the education of our students.

Endowed professorships allow the College to recruit distinguished scholars and provide support for their research and academic activities.

Recent gifts for endowed chairs include:

A $3 million gift from William K. Bowes, Jr. to establish an endowed chair for the director of the campus's Center for Stem Cell Biology and Engineering. This appointment will allow the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology to build upon its research and teaching in the area of developmental biology, with an emphasis on the basic mechanisms that underlie proliferation and differentiation of cells.

$1 million from the Marsha and Jay Glazer Foundation to establish the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and the Marsha and Jay Glazer Jewish Studies Program Endowment. The endowment will support a professorship and provide funding for research, teaching and  programming in Jewish Studies, as well as for undergraduate and graduate education.

$2 million from Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp for the creation of four distinguished professorships, two in the social sciences and two in the humanities, clustered around the study of global civil society. The endowed chairs will focus on global authority and governance, global religions and modernism, global media and representation, and transnational civil society netwirks.

$600,000 from alumnus Anton Vonk and his wife Diane Boss to establish an endowed chair in political science. The Vonk professorship will support the teaching and research of a renowned scholar specializing in international security studies related to energy and the environment and will be affiliated with the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management.

Private contributions play an indispensable role in the development of the College’s renowned research centers.

Some major gifts include:

A multiyear commitment from Paul Orfalea and the Orfalea Family Foundation for the creation of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. A two-year Master of Arts program in Global and International Studies combines courses from the social sciences and humanities with practical training and real-world experience.

Two significant endowments for the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life, part of the response to a $1.5 million challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities:
  • The Henry A. Schimberg Endowment in Ethics and Enterprise was made possible by a $250,000 endowment gift from Mr. Schimberg. The Schimberg Endowment seeks to develop among the next generation of business and corporate leaders a strong sense of personal and business ethics and social responsibility. It supports an upper-division undergraduate seminar on “Ethics, Enterprise, and Leadership” which is taught once each year. Unlike many courses on business ethics, this one is grounded in the teachings of the liberal arts and is concerned with introducing students to concepts of Western and non-Western principles of ethical behavior from philosophical and religious traditions.

Gifts for student fellowships, especially for graduate students, allow the College to recruit and support exceptional students.

Recent gifts for student fellowships include:

A $500,000 gift from alumnus M. Ross Johnson and his wife, Charlotte, to establish an endowed fellowship fund to recruit and support outstanding graduate students in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

A $30,000 gift from Bruce and Susan Worster (both UCSB alumni) to support undergraduate and graduate students within the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology (EEMB). The Worster Summer Internship/Research Awards were established to encourage and support undergraduate and graduate research. Undergraduate students selected to receive this award conduct research during the summer and the regular academic year under the mentorship of an EEMB graduate student.

A $500,000 gift from Sara Miller McCune and SAGE Publications to endow the position of Dean of Social Sciences. Dean Melvin L. Oliver, the first SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences, has decided that the proceeds from the endowment will be used to provide fellowships for outstanding underrepresented graduate students in doctoral programs in the social sciences. The first three SAGE Sara Miller McCune fellows began their doctoral study in the fall of 2008.

An endowment gift for the Steve and Barbara Mendell Graduate Fellowship in Cultural Literacy, administered by the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life. The endowment supports one or more fellowship stipends each year for outstanding graduate students in the College of Letters and Science whose research or programs of study advance the goals of broad-based cultural literacy and high ethical standards in our participative democracy.