New Grant Programs Relating to Women in Higher Education

The Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities received a $500,000 grant from the law firm DLA Piper, for the establishment of the Amy Schulman Fund for Women and Gender.

The fund honors Amy Schulman, a Wesleyan graduate and member of the board of trustees who is a former partner of DLA Piper. Schulman is now executive vice president and general counsel of Pfizer Inc.

Sweet Briar College, the liberal arts college for women in Virginia, received a 10-year, $500,000 gift from alumna Cynthia Wilson Ottaway to establish the Ottaway Endowed Fund in support of the Tusculum Institute. The institute is dedicated to environmentally sustainable historic preservation. The institute is named for the childhood home of Maria Crawford Fletcher, the mother of the founder of Sweet Briar College, Indiana Fletcher Williams. The home, originally built in 1750 and expanded in the early 1800s, is on the Sweet Briar campus.

Texas Woman’s University in Denton received a $500,000 gift from the estate of Dorothy Ebersbach to support the endowment for the university’s archives of the Women Airforce Service Pilots. The gift will help fund the effort to digitize the 1 million document pages, 25,000 photographs, and 700 oral histories that make up the archive.

The WASPs were a group of women pilots who flew military transports during World War II. The Blagg-Huey Library at Texas Woman’s University is home to the group’s official archives. More information on the archives is available here.

Dorothy Ebersbach grew up in Ohio and learned to fly when working for her father’s construction company. When World War II began she enlisted and flew supply missions, test flights, and towed objects that were used as targets for soldiers who were involved in anti-aircraft training. Ebersbach died in November 2011 at the age of 96.