The Department of Classics received a major gift in December to support the study of Greek and Latin. The bequest was in the amount of $450,000. The donor, Walter Harding Maurer, earned his BA in Classics at UVM in 1943. Classmates Jean Davison (UVM Class of '44 and Professor of Classics Emerita) and Lynn Vreeland (Class of '44 and Planning Chair of UVM's Green and Gold Committee) fondly remember Maurer as a gangly, studious, genteel man, but above all as a brilliant linguist. He was a native of New York City, where his father played in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra and where young Maurer was introduced to both Greek and Latin in high school. Upon graduating from UVM (Phi Beta Kappa), Maurer was drafted into the Army and served during WW II as a mule skinner in the China-India-Burma theatre. There he developed an interest in Sanskrit language and literature, which he studied independently with local pundits and informally as an auditor at various South Asian universities. After the war, he returned to the States, taught briefly as a graduate assistant in classical languages at UVM (1947-48), met his wife, Geraldine, a librarian at the Library of Congress (she predeceased him by only a few months), and in 1962 earned his Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Penn State. The author of a definitive grammar of Sanskrit and many articles and translations of Hindu texts, Maurer taught at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, until his retirement. He died in August 2007.

At the request of the donor, the Maurer endowment was established in honor of UVM professors Lester Prindle, Arthur Myrick, and George Kidder. Prindle was professor of Classics from 1928 to 1944 and is remembered by many as an awe-inspiring teacher and discriminating bibliophile. (He was largely responsible for Bailey-Howe's remarkable collection of illustrated editions of Ovid.) Kidder, UVM class of 1922, himself a memorable teacher and professor of Classics, also served as Dean of the College. (There is a shrine to his memory in a display window on the first floor of Lafayette. The Kidder Award, given annually to an outstanding faculty member in the University is named after him.) Myrick, who came to UVM from Harvard in 1905, was a distinguished professor of Romance Languages for many years.

The Department of Classics gratefully acknowledges this wonderful gift, which will be used to support a graduate fellowship, several undergraduate prizes for translation of Greek and Latin texts, and two prizes for travel to classical sites abroad.