Seeing—and Supporting—UConn's Changes
From the March 2011 issue of Our Moment, the UConn Foundation's e-newsletter.
Michael Cronin attended UConn in the 1960s, just as male students began growing their hair long, folk singers proliferated on campus and questioning the government became more than an idle pastime. He left Storrs for New York, then Washington, but continued to follow UConn’s progress. In the 1980s, for very specific reasons, he started to pay closer attention.
“Women started showing up in pictures of the Board of Trustees in the Alumni Magazine, then people of color began appearing, then Geno Auriemma was hired and more black women began showing up on the basketball team,” he says. “I applaud the team’s record of excellence. Seven national championships! But I’m just as impressed with the 100 percent graduation rate for every one of the team’s 26 years. They’ve proved you can have both a commitment to opportunities for people of color and women, and a record of athletic and academic excellence.”
Cronin’s appreciation for that progress has translated into a planned gift to the Fund for UConn, which allows the University to direct monies to its greatest needs.
“You have to invest,” he says. “I don’t need a toilet named after me to support this kind of commitment to excellence, including academic excellence. That’s why I want no restrictions on the money. Who can tell in 2015 if we need to send 30 kids to Kenya or we need to build a chemistry lab? I would want my modest legacy to be made available for whatever purposes the people at the university need it for – the people who turned it around from being an ordinary school. I don’t care how they turned it around; I just know they made a commitment to change, and they have sustained it.”
Cronin also wanted to thank UConn for preparing him for the workforce. He landed a job as an epidemiologist for the New York City Health Department early in his career, then moved on to jobs as varied as working for consumer advocate Ralph Nader, various consulting and non-profit companies, and finally the federal government.
“I moved around often, and I think the University prepared me for that,” he says. “You don’t see what the University did for you until you get out there.”
Now that he is retired and thinking about what’s next, he is trying to ensure that the gifts he makes will count. “UConn turned itself around, 20 years after I left,” he says. “The campus finally looks like what America looks like. And I know that if you want that, you have to financially support it.”
For more information about making a planned gift, please contact Hal Reed at 860-486-6035 or the Foundation's development staff for more information.
