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NEWPORT BEACH philanthropist Maria Barcelo Crutcher has given the School of Public Administration $425,000 to complete the endowment of the Maria B. Crutcher Professorship in Citizenship and Democratic Values.
Two separate gifts have endowed the professorship. The first was given by Maria Crutcher and her late husband, Richard, in 1976. That gift, for $562, 500, has subsequently grown to $760,000. Together with the latest gift, the professorship’s total endowment is $1.185 million.
“We are deeply honored by Maria Crutcher’s generous gift,” said Jane G. Pisano, dean of the School of Public Administration. “She has devoted her life to helping educate students, and we are pleased to connect her name in perpetuity with the teachings of citizenship and democracy. By endowing this professorship, Maria Crutcher will continue to touch the lives of students of public policy and public administration.”
Professor Terry L. Cooper, a nationally recognized expert on citizen participation and ethics in government, has been appointed the professorship’s first holder.
A NATIVE OF MEXICO, Maria Carlota Barcelo moved to Arizona as an infant, shortly before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1911. Her family moved to Los Angeles when she was 6 years old.
At the age of 20, she returned to Arizona to pursue a career in fashion design. By the age of 30, she had opened an exclusive dress shop in Tucson and had designed and popularized the “broomstick skirt,” which she sold across the country.
In the 1940s, Crutcher returned to Southern California, settling in Newport Beach with her husband, Richard, a banker with a kindred philanthropic spirit.
“I was born in Mexico, but America has always been my country,” she said. “The fruits of our success will someday go to the children of the world – perhaps not our own – but children of mankind who deserve the best future possible.”
The most recent gift is the latest in a series that began in 1974 with the endowment of a professorship in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and, later, a professorship in the Law School, both named after Richard Crutcher. After her husband’s death in 1981, Maria Crutcher established the Maria B. and Richard L. Crutcher Scholarship Fund through Town and Gown, which provides scholarships for seven Hispanic students per year.
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