Beach Gift Furthers Lasting Connection to College

Walter Beach '56 funds faculty chairs through a $7 million estate gift

January 2, 2010

Walter Beach ’56, left, with brother Allen ’55, at the 2004 dedication of the Rush statue, enjoyed a long and distinguished political science career as a senior staff member at the Brookings Institution and as director of Heldref Publications with the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation.

Walter Beach ’56 loved to connect the dots. Whether booking congressmen as speakers for the Brookings Institution, networking with Washington, D.C., politicos as assistant director of the American Political Science Association or pulling strings to bring a reproduction of the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery’s Benjamin Rush statue to campus, he had a passion for making connections that made things happen.

“He just had this ability to tie all these things together,” says his brother Allen Beach ’55, who spoke almost daily with Walter on politics, history and all things Dickinson until Walter’s death in 2006. “He could just dig into history and culture and figure out how this might connect with that.”

It’s fitting then that Walter’s name will be tied to Dickinson permanently through a $7 million estate gift that will help professors make connections in the classroom and beyond. With the bulk of the gift going to establish endowed faculty chairs, Beach’s gift will provide permanent support for research and teaching at the college.

According to the first professor to benefit from Beach’s generosity, the gift also will have a more practical impact for the future chair incumbents. “Because there’s a research fund associated with the chair, it allows you to pursue research without having to go through a long approval process,” says Andrew Rudalevige, Walter E. Beach ’56 Chair in Political Science.

“If there’s a conference at Brookings or AEI [American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research] down in Washington, I can go,” he adds. “If I need a digital scanner to get some archival material into my computer, I can get it. Having that fund frees you from the paperwork and allows you to just do the research without worrying about having to apply for a grant.”

The estate gift adds to Beach’s impressive legacy of service and support for Dickinson. He served on the Alumni Council from 1968 to ’74 and was a trustee from 1988 to 2005, when he was awarded emeritus status. Besides establishing the Liselotte von Usedom Beach Scholarship for German majors with his brother and the Walter E. Beach Scholarship, he also provided several historic manuscripts and letters to the college archives, including the text of a rare 1764 speech by John Dickinson.

Walter’s efforts to promote Dickinson were a big part of his daily life. He mentioned the college in conversation at least three times a day—and encouraged others to do so—and scoured newspapers for news that might be useful to Dickinson.

“He was a humongous reader of newspapers,” says Allen. “He’d go through every page of the Sunday New York Times and Washington Post, and if you were on his list, by Wednesday you could expect that something was coming your way.”

These efforts, along with his professional achievements, earned Walter the college’s distinguished alumni award in 1992 and a posthumous honorary doctor of public service in 2006. “What made Walter’s passion for Dickinson’s history so unusual was the way he embraced and acted upon it,” said President William G. Durden ’71 during the degree-conferring ceremony.

“But Walter’s interest in Dickinson was not confined to the past,” Durden continued. “He understood that it was just as important to nurture current connections that would, in turn, be essential for Dickinson’s future. And connect he did! I am sure we were not alone in the President’s Office at Dickinson when we used to speculate that Walter single-handedly kept the U.S. Postal Service in the black. And that was before he discovered the power and ease of e-mail!”

As Allen considers how this estate gift adds to his brother’s legacy, he notes that those connections and their impact help to keep Walter’s memory alive. Having visited the campus this fall for Homecoming & Family Weekend, he thought of Walter when he saw the Benjamin Rush portrait by Thomas Sully, which recently came to Dickinson via Lockwood Rush, a descendent of the college’s founder whom Walter introduced to the college.

“You look at this portrait, and there’s Walter again,” Allen says with a laugh. “And that’s really how I remember him—always making those connections.”