An Endowed Chair with Loads of History:
From the January 2011 issue of Our Moment, the UConn Foundation's e-newsletter.
Robert Gross, who holds the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair of Early American History in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has always been a newsman at heart. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he worked as the executive director of the U.S. Student Press Association, where he had the opportunity to make connections at Newsweek, Harper’s and other distinguished news journals.
But graduate school beckoned, so he put off journalism to get a master's in American history at Columbia University. Then Newsweek lured him away, and he quickly ran on the journalistic fast track.
Still he was torn: He could record history through journalism, or he could record and teach it through academia. Eventually, he had to choose, and the result was a career in academia, teaching and writing history with a broad public audience in mind. His dissertation was a book written for the bicentennial of the American Revolution. “The Minutemen and Their World,” a story of the Revolution told from the perspective of the townspeople of once-sleepy Concord, Mass., won the coveted Bancroft Prize for American history in 1977.
“I loved doing the book,” Gross says. “How did these ordinary colonial craftsmen and lawyers and doctors and their wives and children come to be part of this effort? They didn’t know what they were in for.”
Gross had planned to return to magazine work once his doctorate was done. But Amherst College and the College of William & Mary came calling, and higher education triumphed. Then friends called him about UConn’s Draper Chair.
“The department at UConn was already strong in early American history,” he says. “But I was quite taken with the possibilities of the Draper Chair.”
James Draper, who passed away in 2010, was specific in his hopes for the chair. He wanted it to support research and teaching in the history of colonial America and the United States to the middle of the nineteenth century in UConn's graduate program in history.
Lofty language, but how does it take shape? Draper ‘41 gave $1.5 million to endow the chair to honor the memory of his wife, Shirley Draper ’41. (See CLAS Dean Jeremy Teitelbaum’s blog post on James Draper at http://www.today.uconn.edu/?p=14085)
Gross uses the endowment for a variety of efforts. He funds research assistantships and student fellowships. He and his students run workshops and colloquia in early American history. And they plan and execute the popular James L. and Shirley A. Draper Graduate Student Conference in Early American Studies. Now in its fourth year, the conference is the only regular gathering in the early American field to be run and hosted by graduate students, who choose the theme, issue the call for papers, invite keynote speakers, and select and organize the panels. The conference also significantly raises UConn’s profile among history departments nationally, all made possible by a generous endowment.
For a faculty member, an endowed chair is a lure, a way to make ideas that once seemed like a financial reach a reality. The Draper Chair lured Gross to UConn, and the University and the field of history are the better for it.
“The long-range goal is to generate interest in early American history,” Gross says. “The resources are made available to use for fostering the development of early American studies, and to help the department’s profile.”
In the spirit of the journalist, he still aims for a big audience. "We make news for UConn with our scholarship, our conferences, and our teaching,” he says. “Our students at all levels are our fellow citizens and our future readers."
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THE ENDOWED FACULTY SERIES:
