New gift from the Craver family to name the College of Arts & Sciences deanship

Longtime Carolina advocates and supporters Vicki ’92 and David Craver ’92 have made a transformative commitment to establish the Craver Family Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences. This forward-thinking gift will allow the College to remain nimble and responsive to immediate and strategic needs in the future and is a vote of confidence in how the College serves students at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Vicki, a Campaign for Carolina co-chair and Carolina Women’s Campaign Cabinet member, and David, a board member of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Foundation Investment Fund, Inc., have supported the College for more than 20 years, building relationships with Dean Terry Rhodes ’78, Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and several other past deans.

“The Cravers have long demonstrated their thoughtful and generous commitment to Carolina. I know they have thought long and hard about where their new Campaign for Carolina gift would have the most impact,” Guskiewicz said. “As a former dean of the College, I appreciate their strategic approach and how much they care about Carolina. I also know that transformative philanthropic commitments, like this one from the Cravers, truly provide the margin of excellence for which the College and the University are known.”

Once fully invested, the deanship will provide a lasting endowment that will give deans of the College the resources and flexibility to seize emerging opportunities and advance key priorities, such as the recruitment of full-time tenure-track faculty and the best and brightest graduate students. This commitment could also enable the hiring of new staff members to assist undergraduates with obtaining access to high-impact learning experiences such as credit-bearing internships, research opportunities or study abroad.

“The impact of this remarkable commitment will be felt by students and faculty across campus,” said Rhodes. “The Cravers are benefactors in the truest sense of the word. The Craver Family deanship will be linked with the College for the rest of its history, and we are forever grateful.”

The College’s deanship dates back to 1935, when the University’s oldest school took its modern-day name, and includes a strong lineage of academic leadership, honors and contributions. The Cravers’ endowment will build upon this history and further distinguish the College of Arts & Sciences among its peers. As the largest academic unit on campus, the College of Arts & Sciences forms the academic core of the Carolina experience, or what Vicki calls “the heart of the University.”

“Carolina is a family affair for us. David’s parents and brother and both of my sisters all attended. In addition, many of our closest, dearest friends are the friends we made at UNC. So, the school has always had our hearts,” said Vicki. “In thinking about this gift, we were excited to enable Carolina, with its public mission, to be responsive to whatever opportunities are most important at any given time.”

The Cravers’ most recent generous gift counts toward For All Kind: the Campaign for Carolina, the University’s $4.25 billion campaign. Their previous contributions helped equip a lecture room in the Carolina Physical Science Complex and supported the Honors Carolina Study Abroad Scholarship Fund and the Kappa Kappa Gamma Distinguished Professorship. In the 2018-19 academic year alone, their contributions supported faculty and students in nine departments through the Vicki and David Craver Fund for Faculty Leadership.

As Rhodes noted, “The Cravers’ philanthropic commitments over the years have propelled the College forward and enabled so much for our students and faculty, which makes naming the deanship for them even more meaningful for the College.”

Learn more about the Cravers and why they made this commitment.