Volume 29 · Number 2 · Winter 2012
Campaign Gift Highlights
Ted and Silvia Hillyer established an endowment for graduate student support as part of the Soderquist Matching Fund Initiative.
Alumni, business leaders, faculty, staff and retirees are just some of the many generous donors who have made gifts to the university as part of The Campaign for UC Davis. To date, UC Davis has inspired gifts that total more than $744,745,853 from more than 85,409 supporters. The campaign seeks to inspire $1 billion in support from 100,000 donors by the end of 2014 to help UC Davis advance excellence, innovation, opportunity, public service and quality of life for decades to come.
Ann Pitzer '58 recently gave $20,000 through the Pitzer Family Foundation to enhance the Ann E. Pitzer Scholarship Fund, which supports students with financial needs and demontrated academic achievement. Pitzer, who is member of the UC Davis Foundation Board of Trustees, is also the lead donor for the Class of '58 Scholarship — an endowed fund supported through gifts from 1958 graduates, as well as friends of the class.
A $2.3 million bequest from the late staff member Erna Thompson will assist UC Davis students. Thompson, wife of the late Professor Orville Thompson, worked in the plant pathology department from 1951 through 1983 and died in 2010. She left more than $2 million in her will to support graduate students in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and $100,000 to an endowment for the Cal Aggie Marching Band-uh.
The Bilinski Educational Foundation awarded a $500,000 grant to the College of Letters and Science to provide financial support to graduate students in the social sciences and humanities. So far, 10 graduate students have received fellowships through the fund.
Fred and Jane Arp
More than two dozen faculty, staff, retirees and emeriti faculty committed $696,000 to support graduate and professional school students through the Soderquist Matching Fund Initiative for Graduate Student Support. Their contributions — together with $500,000 in matching funds from the estate of entrepreneur Charlie Soderquist, M.S., '74, Ph.D. '78 — established 27 new endowments, totaling nearly $1.2 million, to support graduate students. The pilot initiative came to a successful close in the fall, with all the matching funds allocated.
Fred '67, Cred. '68, and Jane Arp have made planned gifts that total more than $1.1 million to Intercollegiate Athletics for future capital improvements at Aggie Stadium. The Arps said other donors' contributions and their own passion for UC Davis athletics motivated their commitments. Fred Arp, a long-time assistant coach of the Aggie football team, retired in 2007 after 44 years on campus as both a student-athlete and as a coach. In 2010, Arp was inducted into the Cal Aggie Athletics Hall of Fame.
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