The University of Southern California’s humanities department just received a $15 million donation from alumna Elizabeth Van Hunnick, who was born and raised in Cypress.
She donated in her family’s name to the Department of History at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, from which she graduated. It was the largest single donation to USC’s humanities department.
“With this gift, she is ensuring new opportunities for both faculty and students whose scholarship rigorously examines and illuminates the history that shapes our communities and our world,” said USC President Carol L. Folt.
USC announced it now will be called the Van Hunnick History Department. The gift will endow three faculty chairs named after family members, establish a faculty research fund and create a graduate student fellowship.
The three new faculty chairs will be the Elizabeth J. Van Hunnick Endowed Chair in History; the Garrett Van Hunnick Endowed Chair in History, named after her late father; and the Wilhelmina Van Hunnick Endowed Chair in History, after her late sister.
Van Hunnick, a dedicated teacher, said she hoped that the donation could help to support the department’s development and attract more prominent scholars.
History is “important because you can see what’s happening in the world today; you see leaders and politicians making the same mistakes over and over again,” she said.
Van Hunnick’s parents emigrated to the United States from the Netherlands in the 1920s and started a dairy business in Orange County. Van Hunnick grew up learning about European history and culture, which inspired her to pursue a degree in history.
A 2016 donation to the school established the Garrett and Anne Van Hunnick Chair in European History to honor her late parents. The inaugural chair is held by Anne Goldgar, an expert in European history with an emphasis on Netherlands and Francophone cultures.
“I agree with the Greeks that in order to be a well-educated person you should study many, many different things,” Van Hunnick said. “It’s not just taking a course to get a job. That’s fine, but it’s important to be, I guess the old-fashioned term is ‘well-rounded.’”
The two landmark donations represent one of the largest endowment contributions to any U.S. university history department.
