Turning a legacy into a living gift
Former UO professor Roger Chickering and Alison Baker (JD ’85), have a reverence for history.
“Everything has a history.” Roger says. “This proposition applies alike to the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—to politics, societies, languages and literature, religion, genomes, and quantum particles. It all has a past, so as I used to tell my students, it all belongs to our field as historians.”
Alison adds, “And, no less than any natural science, understanding the past requires research, although it typically takes place less in the laboratory than in the library and archive.”
The two met when Roger asked Alison, who at the time was the Associate Dean for Financial Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences, for a raise. He failed, but a decade later he asked for her hand. Soon afterwards, in 1993, they moved to Washington DC, where Roger had accepted a position at Georgetown University.Even as the couple built a life thousands of miles away, they remained close to friends they had made during their time in Oregon – particularly with Tom and Kathy Brady.
“Tom Brady and I were together in the history department for many years— and the four of us were fast friends,” explained Roger. As they coped with the news that Tom’s health was in decline, Alison brought up the idea several years ago that the estate gift, which the four friends had begun to fund in 2012, could be given a more immediate impact.
As Alison tells it, “I woke up one day and said to Roger, ‘do you think we could manage to set up the chair now, while Tom is still living?’”
The answer was yes, as Kathy quickly agreed.
After working with Renée Gordon, Executive Director of Development, the estate gift became an outright gift to create the Katharine G. Brady & Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Roger Chickering & Alison Baker Professor of Central European Histories, as an endowed position.
This fall, David Luebke was named the inaugural BBCB history professor, and he is enthusiastic about the opportunities afforded by the professorship, enabling him to receive support for his research, travel, and personal growth as a scholar and educator.
“It is an enormous honor and a privilege,” said Professor Luebke. “I’d known about Roger and Tom for forever. Since I was a beginning graduate student. Tom especially was a kind of guiding light, his research – especially his books on religious upheaval in the 16th century provided a model for me as I was working on my dissertation.”
He added, “and Roger was on everyone’s comprehensive exams list – just a major figure in the anglophone world of scholars who worked on different periods in German history.”
Professor Luebke is new in this role, but he has a lot planned to take advantage of the opportunities provided by this endowed professorship.
“What it means as a practical manner, I have resources available to me – if I need to go to an archive for a couple of weeks, the resources of the chair make it possible for me to just go,” he explains. “And it helps me be an active, researching, publishing, scholar— which helps me be a better teacher.”
For Roger and Alison, this gift will help to ensure that the UO History Department remains outstanding and that students can appreciate the fundamental importance of history to a college education. Its establishment now emphasizes the significance of the professorship as a monument to a friendship that began at the University of Oregon in 1968.