CONWAY -- A trustee at the University of Central Arkansas and his wife have established a $1 million endowment to provide financial support for students to live and study abroad.
The endowment by Trustee Bunny Adcock and his wife Carol is the second one the Adcocks have made for study-abroad opportunities, UCA said in a news release Thursday. The first one was allocated for students majoring in a foreign language who also planned to become educators.
In the 1970s, Carol Adcock was a foreign-language teacher at UCA and an adviser for foreign-language student teachers in secondary schools.
"I was going to all the schools where they were student teaching, and I saw what a difference it made to go into a classroom where the teacher had never been abroad," she said in the release. "I thought it would be better to go abroad and actually know the culture."
UCA President Tom Courtway said the new endowment "will provide opportunities for generations of UCA students to travel the world, learn other cultures and languages, interact with others and really change UCA and Arkansas."
The Adcocks' first endowment has provided more than 80 students with a total of almost $45,000 since 2000. The new endowment is much broader and will allow full-time students of all majors and career paths to apply for the study abroad funds, the Adcocks said. Preference will be given to students majoring in a foreign language. The scholarships will fund up to 75 percent of program costs that include travel, food, lodging and tuition and fees.
"That's all a part of growing and expanding your horizons and that's what will happen to these students. They will grow and develop and be more educated because they left McGehee, Arkansas, and saw there's a lot more to this world than just McGehee," Bunny Adcock said, referring to his hometown.
State Desk on 11/12/2016