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$3.2 million bequest by former UT professor to help hundreds |
| By
Jon Strunk |
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Jul 20, 2005 |
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It’s often easy to reduce the world to numbers. Numbers describe distances, count amounts and offer comparisons. Numbers, particularly in a large scale, can be difficult to wrap your mind around. A $3.2 million bequest to the University by former UT economics professor Dr. Edward Shapiro following his death has the potential to fall into this category.
A sum as vast as $3.2 million can quickly become a statistic without a reminder that Shapiro’s gift represents the education of one student at a time, hundreds of times over.
“These scholarships are a godsend to students,” said Dr. Michael Dowd, associate professor and chair of economics. “Ed wanted to make sure that the money he was giving went to good students struggling to make ends meet.”
Shelby Bensi, a 2004 UT graduate from the economics department, seems a perfect example of the type of student whose success Shapiro wanted to assure.
Bensi graduated with a list of accolades paralleled by few at UT — a 4.0 GPA, recognition as the College of Arts and Sciences’ most outstanding student, an undergraduate research grant from the UT Honors Program, a research paper published in a professional economic journal studying the correlation between a state’s investment in education and the corresponding economic return, and a full scholarship from the National Science Foundation to attend any of the multiple graduate schools engaged in a bidding war to attract her to their campuses.
Three years earlier, however, Bensi’s future academic success was far from a sure thing.
“The summer before my sophomore year my father passed away,” she said. In addition to the personal loss, her father was her primary source for financial assistance. It was a Shapiro scholarship — from Shapiro’s previous $550,000 donation — that allowed her to stay in school.
“I can’t express how grateful I am,” said Bensi, now a graduate student at the University of Delaware. “If I’d have had to work 40 hours a week just to make ends meet, there’s no way I could have done the honors work that was a really important part of college for me.”
And Bensi’s is just one success story. “Around this time next year, the department of economics will be giving out $90,000 in scholarships from Ed alone,” Dowd said. “A gift like this is just absolutely selfless. It’s really something that as a faculty member really recharges your batteries and opens up so many opportunities for students.”
Shapiro’s gift provides $1.25 million each to the departments of economics and English and establishes a lecture series for UT and the surrounding community.
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