Alexander F. Schilt

BA 1964, History		Throughout his distinguished academic and administrative career, Alexander "Corky" Schilt has devoted considerable time and interest to the arts and to social improvement in general. Schilt followed his UW degree with master's and PhD degrees in history from Arizona State. In the1970s and 1980s, Schilt held various administrative posts at Indiana University at New Albany, the University of Richmond, and the University of Houston-Downtown. From 1987 to 1989, he served as president of Eastern Washington University, but then returned to the University of Houston-Downtown, where he is now chancellor. In Houston and in Spokane, Schilt served on the boards of directors of the Whitewater Opera Company, the Greater Houston Area ARC, and the Spokane Symphony Orchestra. His life, he says, would have been different without his undergraduate experiences at the UW: "Those years were decisive both for my direction in life and for the formation of values beyond the fundamental ones I had learned at home. "I arrived on campus unfocused about my calling and narrow in my awareness of the world. One turning point was studying under Eugene Hardy, who taught Russian history. He instilled in me an appreciation for the power and attraction of the life of the mind. Harder to specify were the encouragements I had to transcend parochialism and ethnocentrism. When I graduated, I had not only come to tolerate differing points of view, but also to prize the cultural diversity that generated a variety of understandings and values. The University of Wyoming is located in the same corner of the world in which I had grown up, but somehow it equipped me to become a citizen of the world,"