More Details on the $3 Million Gift to the English Dept.

On Sept. 26, the English department received a $3 million endowment to go towards the creation of an endowed chair for creative writing, a permanently funded position created by the funding generated by the endowment.

While the majority of the English Department faculty and students were unaware of the incoming gift (for the privacy of the donor, according to English department chair Judith Livingston, Ph.D.), the CSU Foundation worked with the College of Letters and Sciences to draft and create the programs to be funded by the endowment. Donald L. Jordan, a local author and businessman, gave the gift to CSU for the purpose of promoting creative writing in a direction of “traditional American values.”

While some professors from the English Department were troubled by the vague language of the endowment’s purpose, as the phrase “traditional American values” tends to carry some political baggage. Jordan’s meaning of traditional American values is based more on traits such as “responsibility, gratitude, generosity, faith and love,” according to both Mr. Jordan and Livingston.

The endowment is meant to help CSU foster writing in a method similar to what Jordan views as canonical American writing, such as the work of “writers like Fitzgerald or Cormac McCarthy,” rather than following the current writing culture of “excitement, titillation, vampires and violence,” said Jordan.

According to Tom Helton, Ed. D, the Vice President for Business and Finance, the $3 million endowment is split into two different portions. While the university received a $1 million cash gift, the remaining $2 million value of the endowment comes in the form of a commercial property that will provide its value as paid rent, received monthly beginning January 1, 2017.

The monetary portion of the endowment will not be available for access until Oct. 2017, at which point it will begin to earn a four percent interest for use by the university, according to Jill Carroll, the Development Director of the College of Letters and Sciences.

In addition to the endowed professorship, the endowment provides funding for a new service-based, humanitarian study abroad program to provide an opportunity for student writers to gain worldly experience and inspire writing on the subject of their travels, as well as a contest for creative writing.

A gift of this size also begs the question of how involved the donor will be in managing the program. Jordan has chosen to take a more hands-off approach, preferring to “leave that direction of defining what writing fits the program’s focus] to the staff and the members of the judging board” of the endowed writing contest as well as the discretion of the endowed professorship created by the program.

“I want to return old-fashioned values to modern writing,” said Jordan. “Publishers now are more interested in making money. My purpose is to encourage young writers, not just chronologically, to look towards making real characters and real people, who you believe in and love, and right now we’re losing that.”