Atwood Foundation to give $1 million to UAA

By: Staff Apr 22, 2008

Gift to help fulfill dream of perpetual endowment of chair in journalism

ANCHORAGE, AK – The Atwood Foundation, the great civic legacy of Robert and Evangeline Rasmuson Atwood, has pledged to give the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Department of Journalism and Public Communications $1 million toward endowment of the Atwood Chair of Journalism.

The gift will be spread over a five-year period with annual payments of $200,000. The first check was given to UAA Chancellor Fran Ulmer last week.

The Atwood Chair of Journalism was created in 1980 as a beneficiary of the Atwood family. Bob Atwood was then and had been since 1935 the publisher and editor of The Anchorage Times, which remained the largest newspaper in Alaska for decades and is often credited with applying the most muscle to the effort in the 1950s and before to make Alaska a state.

Through the Atwood Foundation, created in 1962, Bob Atwood funded the Atwood Chair with yearly donations to further the cause of educating the next generation of Alaska reporters and editors.

The Atwood Chair has boasted Pulitzer Prize winners and leading journalists from the New York Times, Associated Press, Denver Post, Minneapolis Tribune, Philadelphia Bulletin, Seattle Times, Santa Barbara News-Press, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Those holding the Atwood Chair teach journalism courses and serve as advisors to students, but their influence is wider still.

The current Atwood Chair is Julius Strauss, a former correspondent for The Daily Telegraph (U.K.), who has covered some of the bloodiest conflicts of the last 15 years, including wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan. For a number of years he was the paper’s Moscow bureau chief. Please visit his Web site – www.juliusstrauss.com – for a more complete picture of the horrors Mr. Strauss has witnessed and a compilation of some of his more riveting dispatches.

Julius Strauss, who has been the Atwood Chair since last spring, is a perfect example of the benefit to Alaskans that the Atwood legacy has created. During the current semester he is teaching Global Media and Communications Systems, and Selected Topics in Journalism and Public Communications: War Reporting. But in his tenure as the Atwood Chair, Strauss also has imparted his knowledge and regaled listeners with tales of his experiences through speaking appearances at Alaska Pacific University, the Alaska Press Club, Alaska Professional Communicators (formerly Alaska Press Women), the Alaska World Affairs Council and elsewhere. On Thursday, April 24, Julius Strauss will visit South Anchorage High School to discuss his experiences and the craft of journalism with students there.

“Teaching at UAA has been a great experience,” Julius Strauss said. “It gave me a chance to take all those little kernels of wisdom I had squirreled away during my years working in the world’s wilder places and pass them on to a new generation of young reporters. At first blush, Afghanistan and Alaska might not have much in common, but looking at cultures and values different from our own enriches us all, not just as journalists but as human beings.”

Tonight at the Atwood home, the large house in the Hillcrest section of West Anchorage built by the Atwoods, Mr. Strauss will be the guest of honor of the Atwood Foundation. (The last surviving member of the immediate family, Elaine Atwood, Bob’s and Evangeline’s 2nd daughter, died in 2003.) Strauss’s appearance will be in keeping with a strong tradition started by Bob Atwood, said Bill Tobin, senior editor of the Voice of the Times and vice chairman of the Atwood Foundation.

“The Atwood house was built for entertaining,” Tobin said. “Evangeline was a great hostess and loved to have people over – maybe a social leader, a vice president, a military leader, a king. We would generally have dinner and then coffee in the living room where the guest would speak. That would be followed by conversation.”

Tobin said the Foundation’s $1 million contribution would take year-to-year uncertainty out of the program. “We, the foundation board, wanted to permanently ensure that Bob Atwood’s name is attached to the university and to solidify the chair itself,” he said.

“We’ve talked about this for several years,” said Bob Reeves, president of the Atwood Foundation. “Even before his death (in 1997), Bob Atwood talked about endowing the chair.”

Reeves, who expects additional contributions toward the endowment to be made by others, also alluded to keeping the Atwood legacy alive. “Bob Atwood was a journalist of Alaska for 62 years, and we want his name and legacy remembered, and we thought this was the best way to do it,” said Reeves.

For additional information about the Atwood Foundation, consult its Web site at http://www.atwoodfoundation.org/ , or contact President Bob Reeves at (907) 274.4900.

For information about UAA, the journalism department and the Atwood Chair of Journalism, please contact senior development officer Ivy Spohnholz of the UAA Office of University Advancement, at (907) 786-1944 or anias2@uaa.alaska.edu.