By Kate Rix
A major gift to UC Berkeley from Barbro and Bernard Osher through the Pro Suecia Foundation has established an endowed chair for the Department of Scandinavian, the department’s first endowed chair. It was created with generous philanthropy from the Oshers as well as a matching gift from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as part of Berkeley’s Hewlett Challenge.
The Barbro Osher Chair for the Department of Scandinavian will help further the excellence of the department, one of only three freestanding academic departments in North America dedicated specifically to the study of Scandinavian languages and literatures.
“When we strengthen Berkeley’s department, the entire field of Scandinavian studies in North America gets stronger,” said department chair Karin Sanders. “This is a wonderful and welcome endowment that will help sustain our field in numerous ways.”
The Department of Scandinavian offers language instruction and an array of courses focusing on Scandinavian culture, ranging from Norse mythology and the Viking adventurers to literature, film, and theater — with classes devoted to the plays of August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen, the films of Ingmar Bergman, and the works of Hans Christian Andersen and Isak Dinesen.
The gift from the Oshers is aligned with many of Barbro Osher’s other civic contributions. She is the Swedish Consul General in San Francisco and, with her husband Bernard, one of the nation’s most generous supporters of education and the arts.
A native of Stockholm and president of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, Osher came to the Bay Area in the early 1980s. She was aware, even earlier, of Berkeley’s strong Department of Scandinavian — but not that the field in general was in jeopardy.
“I didn’t realize at that time that Scandinavian departments in the U.S. were starting to dwindle,” Osher said during a recent interview at the Berkeley Faculty Club. Most alarming, she noted, was when faculty at the University of Minnesota merged their Scandinavian department into Germanic Studies. “If there is one place where one would expect to see a Department of Scandinavian maintained, it would be that one, given how many of Minnesota’s citizens’ ancestors hail from Scandinavian countries. That was a wake up call for a lot of people.”
“We are a very small language group,” said Barbro Osher. “I can easily understand the consolidation into bigger language groups [like German]. But I really didn’t want to see that happen here at Berkeley.”
In fact, Osher admires Berkeley’s “pan-Nordic” approach, which houses all the Scandinavian languages and literatures together.
“It is very clever to do it that way,” she noted. “It makes a lot of sense to group the languages and literatures together, linking them culturally and linguistically. We in Sweden have a lot of influence from Denmark. Sweden and Norway were linked for 100 years, and Sweden with Finland for 600 years. And of course Iceland still has a foothold in the Old Norse.”
Seated next to Barbro Osher was her husband, Barney, who has traveled extensively throughout Scandinavia. Grouping the languages and literatures together strikes him as a sensible way to preserve rich regional traditions. For example, Finns who speak Swedish use the language uniquely and have retained certain linguistic features. “To my ear,” he said, “Swedish-Finnish has its own intonation and some of the elegant versions of the old Swedish language.”
As one of the nation’s three dedicated Scandinavian departments (the other two are at the University of Washington at Seattle and the University of Wisconsin at Madison), Berkeley is firmly established in the field. In creating the endowed chair, Osher says it is her hope that students at all levels will benefit from the expanded resources.
The Oshers are among the first to see the opportunity created by the “Hewlett Challenge.” In 2007 the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation donated funds to create 100 endowed chairs across campus. Under the terms of the gift, Hewlett funds must be matched dollar-for-dollar by other donors.
“Thanks to the Oshers’ generosity, our wonderful Scandinavian department will be able to do even more,” says Dean of Arts and Humanities Janet Broughton, “as it makes key contributions to scholarship and teaching here at Berkeley. Scandinavian culture is a rich field to explore in so many areas — from philosophy and literature to theater, art, and film. By establishing an endowment at Berkeley, the Oshers will benefit Scandinavian studies not just now, but for decades and decades to come. This kind of philanthropic vision is truly inspiring!”
The chair provides that the incumbent will be the current chairperson of the Department of Scandinavian. As the first chair holder, Sanders will work with her colleagues to ensure that the funds from the endowed chair will be used for departmental priorities — for example, enabling faculty and students to conduct research abroad in addition to providing other important support.
“We are also very proud of our graduate students, and one of our other key priorities is to provide the necessary support they need to conduct dissertation research in the Nordic region,” says Sanders. “The funds from the chair will allow us to offer better graduate fellowship packages and, importantly, to admit international students to our program again. Because these students must pay higher fees, we have not been able to do so for many years.”
Realistically, Barbro Osher’s goal for the field is that it endures in spite of the expanding culture of globalization. “We are in such a global world,” she said. “Yet I think there is still quite a great interest in what the Nordic countries are about — not just their language and culture but also the social and political consciousness that is prevalent there. That's important, and I hope it continues that way.”
