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IUPUI'S SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS RECEIVES $1 MILLION GIFT TO ADVANCE INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION STUDIES

INDIANAPOLIS - A former traveling book salesman whose work took him across Europe and Africa, and a retired IUPUI lecturer who once taught English in Malaysia, have generously donated funds to support intercultural communications studies at IUPUI.

Karl Zimmer and his wife, Barbara, recently donated $1 million to the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI to advance the linguistic-based programs of the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication (ICIC). The couple's gift will endow a faculty chair in intercultural communication.

ICIC finds solutions to intercultural communication problems in academic, professional, and other contexts. Staff members teach languages and intercultural communication through customized training for organizations and individuals, and also teach other language instructors how to provide training specifically geared for learners' needs.

Their gift to the ICIC program is a natural extension of their belief in and support of liberal arts education, said Karl and Barbara Zimmer.

"It is an opportunity to combine a lot of interests, to strengthen IUPUI because we believe it is a great community resource, to strengthen the School of Liberal Arts and to stabilize and insure the continued existence of the ICIC which is based on scholarly, linguistic principles," Barbara Zimmer, a retired IUPUI lecturer, said. "It's like killing five flies with one swat."

Karl and Barbara hold bachelor's degrees in liberal arts. Zimmer attributes their relative ease in adapting to living in foreign cultures to that background.

"Whether you are a Muslim in Afghanistan or a Dane in Denmark, there are certain human values that transcend nationalities or religion," he said. "I believe that a liberal arts education helps you adapt to various differences among cultures."

The Zimmers' gift will lighten the revenue-producing burden of ICIC for years to come, said ICIC Director Ulla Connor.

"The endowment will allow more concentration of ICIC work on research about language use in international and intercultural settings," Connor said. "It will also enable ICIC to contribute to public service projects in response to demands for cultural diversity in Indiana."

Barbara Zimmer and Connor have been friends since 1985 when they both taught classes in the same building at IUPUI. Barbara Zimmer was a part-time writing teacher in the English department when Connor came to IUPUI that year.

Their friendship eventually led Connor to ask Karl Zimmer to serve on the ICIC advisory board that he now chairs. Karl is retired chair of Zimmer Paper Products which manufactured specialty papers used in packaging baked goods such as Wonder Bread.

Karl Zimmer's intercultural experiences date back to World War II when he spent a year traveling Europe on bike after his release from the Navy in 1946. He then enrolled at the University of Chicago where he met Barbara. After they were married, the couple moved to Europe where Karl attended graduate school at the University of Copenhagen, studying Nordic languages and history.

Upon returning to the United States, they settled in New York, before returning overseas to the Netherlands from 1956 - 1964 as Karl traveled across Europe and Africa selling books to foreign book dealers as a representative for a consortium of leading American publishers.

The Zimmers' overseas sojourns also include a seven-month stay in Malaysia during 1994-1995 when Barbara taught freshman composition to engineering students enrolled in a joint program between IUPUI and a Malaysian university.

The Zimmers have donated an existing insurance policy with a cash value of approximately $500,000, and have pledged additional contributions over the next five years for a total of $1 million.

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