Honors Program Gets Boost WSU Pulls In More Than $2 Million In Donations

Another day, another million dollars for Washington State University.

Make that $2 million-plus, as the WSU Foundation Friday announced three major gifts to the university’s small but renowned honors program.

E. Pat Anderson of Seattle raised her total donations to $1 million, paying for scholarships, the V.N. Bhatia Lecture program and the honors program’s first endowed chair.

Part of her bequest honors Eddie Bornander, who she met at WSU only to lose a month after their marriage when Army troops landed at Casablanca in 1942.

Buzz and Maxine Johnson of Bigfork, Mont., gave $250,000. Maxine Johnson majored in secretarial science at then-Washington State College until the dean of the College of Business and Economics looked at her grades and said, “Can you explain to me why you’re majoring in typewriting?” She went on to be a professor of economics at the University of Montana.

Her brother, Robert Champagne, created an honors endowment by selling more than $1 million of stock from his semi-conductor equipment company, Gasonics Corp. Having no college education himself, Champagne got into electronics only after a Marine corporal put him in communications because Champagne told him he had cut telephone poles for a living.

“Everything it seems to me that I did was by luck or accident,” said Champagne. The honors program can help others better plan their success, he said.

Launched in 1960, the invitation-only program gives students an increasingly challenging curriculum aimed at teaching them to write well and think both critically and creatively, said Jane Lawrence, the program director.

Money magazine has rated it among the top 10 of the nation’s 400-plus honors programs. Its alumni are among the most generous to the university, said Bhatia, the program’s former director, but there are only 2,800 of them and their donations until now have gone to other university programs.

“These are the first significant gifts that the program has had,” said Lawrence.

The three donations raise to $185 million the total garnered by Campaign WSU, which is now in its sixth and final year.

, DataTimes