 |
|
     |
|
|
Thanks a million This time, the check really was in the mail. Folklore professor Alan Dundes got a message in March that a former student had called the anthropology department to inquire if he was still teaching folklore at Berkeley, and to arrange to send a check to the University in his honor. “As a folklorist, I don’t believe much of what I hear, especially something like ‘the check’s in the mail,’” says Dundes. So when an envelope arrived, Dundes thought little of it and gave it to his wife to open. She read out loud from the enclosed letter and was delighted to tell him it contained a check for $1,000. She was only off by three zeros. The million-dollar gift was from a former undergraduate who said he uses what he learned in the popular professor’s courses “almost every day of my life.” After a few minutes’ conversation with the donor, Dundes, who has taught classes to overflowing lecture halls for 37 years, remembered the student, for whom he had written a letter of recommendation to medical school. Dundes’s windfall is a gift to the campus, to be used at his discretion. The money will be used to sustain folklore studies into the future. The first order of business will be to establish a Distinguished Professorship in Folkloristics, which will ensure that folklore will continue to be taught at Berkeley after Dundes, 65, retires. “I’ve often worried that the program would fold up and disappear when I leave,” he says. Then there are lots of places where a little extra money would go a long way. The folklore program has always been run on a shoestring, but now it can have a much fatter shoestring. “I myself don’t require much in the way of research funds,” says Dundes. “I remember when my work on [homosexual themes in] football came out, some irate alumnus called the campus demanding to know if public funds had been spent on my research. Well, that research was just me watching football on television!” But preserving the folklore archive, an internationally significant scholarly resource that grows at the rate of about 12,000 items a year, does require funds. And Dundes hopes to spend some of the remainder of the income from the endowment on providing graduate student fellowships; supporting roundtable discussions and seminar series in folkloristics; and increasing the amount of the Steager Prize, given to the best student paper in folkloristics each year, which has been $50 since the 1960s. In short, he will be able to provide for all the little things that build an academic community, and that scholars in better-funded disciplines take for granted. There’s one more thing the gift will provide—respect. “This validates the field of folklore, which is not well known as an academic discipline,” says Dundes. “I’m very thrilled. The gift pleases me personally, but it also pleases me for my field.” |
| |||||||||||
| About
CAA Contact
Us
Update
your Address CAA Career Opportunities Privacy Policy |
©2009 California Alumni
Association. All Rights Reserved For questions about CAA: info@alumni.berkeley.edu Technical inquiries: web@alumni.berkeley.edu
|
Alumni House Berkeley, CA 94720-7520 Toll-Free: (888) CAL-ALUM Phone: (510) 642-7026 Fax: (510) 642-6252
|
