A scholarship is being created this year to honor the late R.J. Snow, a prominent Dixie State College alum and member of the Board of Trustees.

Snow passed away in a car accident in June. In order to honor him with something lasting and substantial, those close to Snow decided to start an endowment in his name instead of purchasing flowers for his funeral.

The endowment is accruing interest this year, and sometime this coming spring, George Whitehead, director of institutional advancement, will meet with Snow’s family to review it. The family will then get to decide the amount of the scholarship each year, in addition to the criteria for the recipient. The scholarship will be available for the 2007-2008 school year.

“It has been a custom to honor someone like R.J. this way, someone who has contributed so much to higher education here at Dixie,” Whitehead said.

According to Snow’s Dixie State College Hall of Fame biography at www.dixie.edu/fame/3rd_annual/education.html, Snow, who is from Cedar City, graduated from Dixie College in 1957, and also served as student body president. He attended the University of Utah, where he received a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. He completed another master’s and a doctorate at Northwestern University. Snow went on to do post-doctoral studies at the University of Oregon and Harvard.

His extensive work in higher education includes tenures as vice president at the University of Utah and Brigham Young University, as well as service on the faculties of many colleges, such as the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Bordeaux in France. Snow worked as the director of the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, then taught political science at BYU. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame at DSC in 2000. Recently, Snow served on the Board of Trustees at DSC during the 2005-2006 school year.

DSC President Lee Caldwell said no person has done more for higher education in the state of Utah than Snow did.

“He had a global vision and a global reach,” Caldwell said. “Everywhere he served, he brought the institution to a higher level of achievement.”

Snow was married to Marilyn Melville in 1962 and together they had three daughters and one son.

According to Snow’s Hall of Fame biography, “In addition to their own children and grandchildren, the Snows feel particularly blessed to have had very close associations with thousands of outstanding young people through more than four decades of education and church service.”

The R.J. Snow scholarship will allow Snow’s positive influence on young people to continue by passing on his love of education.

This entry was posted by Taman Siswa on Thursday, September 14, 2006 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Education News, Scholarship. Tags: College, Education News, Scholarship, Student, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.