In Memory of Mr. Houghton "Buck" Freeman
Van J. Symons
2012
The ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts
ASIANetwork created a window on our website to enable members to submit letters of condolences to the Freeman family. What followed was amazing as literally dozens and dozens of individuals wrote to express their appreciation for Buck and for the Freeman Foundation. Some of those writers were board members and ASIANetwork leaders, while others were consortium members who had participated in the Freeman Foundation-funded "College-in-Asia" and "Student-Faculty Fellows" programs. All were aware
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... t without the early and continued support of Buck and the Freeman family, the impressive emergence of ASIANetwork could not have occurred. It is fortuitous that the beginnings of the Freeman Foundation and ASIANetwork both occurred in 1992. Mr. Freeman was newly retired after serving for a decade as chief operating officer of American International Group (AIG), and he was eager to manage a trust-initially started by his father, Mansfield Freeman, in 1978-committed to developing mutual understanding among Americans and East Asians. Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 1995, the chair of the ASIANetwork board of directors was able to meet with Buck in Stowe. Buck quickly realized that this small but growing national consortium of liberal arts colleges might become a suitable vehicle for his foundation to accomplish some of its goals. Buck read about Augustana College's study-in-Asia program in our March 1996 newsletter and soon after, he informed the leaders of ASIANetwork that he was willing to support a grant initiative to encourage college faculty and administrators to develop similar term or semester-long study-in-Asia programs. Leaders of the consortium accepted his offer and, in the fall of 1996, submitted to him a dual proposal, which, once funded, established the "College-in-Asia" program to enable representatives from 25 different colleges between 1998 and 2004 to travel to East Asia to help them start term-in-Asia study programs. It also created the "Student-Faculty Fellows" program to facilitate undergraduate research in East and Southeast Asia, which since its inception has provided 158 grants to 696 "fellows" from 94 different colleges. Early on in our conversations, Buck made it clear that if we met his expectations, his commitment to ASIANetwork would be solid and unwavering, and he kept this promise. His support for these programs helped us generate interest in ASIANetwork and grow our institutional memberships. Moreover, the small amounts of money built into grant budgets to run these initiatives were central to our remaining financially solvent, especially early on. In addition, much of the leadership of the consortium has been drawn over the years from colleagues who were first introduced to the consortium by serving as mentors to students participating in the "Student-Faculty Fellows" program. In my first conversations with Buck, as a member of the board and then as the executive director of ASIANetwork, he suggested that one of the primary goals of the Freeman Foundation was to provide firsthand experiences in Asia to young people. He felt that such experiences would transform their lives and that they would then, through their actions, draw Asia and North America closer together. His programs, managed by the Institute for International Education to provide grants to hundreds of young people to study Asian lan-
doi:10.16995/ane.6
fatcat:jiw7dc345rgo7dfzat6lhivqbe