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Office of News and Information
Johns Hopkins University
3003 N. Charles Street, Suite 100
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-3843
Phone: (410) 516-7160 / Fax (410) 516-5251
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May 3, 1999
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Dennis O'Shea
dro@jhu.edu
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Trustee Barclay Knapp Endows Deanship of Hopkins
School
International telephone and cable television entrepreneur J.
Barclay Knapp has committed $10 million to The Johns Hopkins
University to endow the deanship of the university's
Krieger School of Arts and Sciences in
memory of his father.
Income from the endowment will be available to the dean as a sort
of academic venture capital fund, providing seed money for new
initiatives and enabling the dean to respond quickly to
innovative proposals from the Arts and Sciences faculty.
"We are profoundly grateful to Barclay for his extraordinary
gift, which recognizes the central role the Krieger School plays
at Johns Hopkins," said William R.
Brody, president of the university. "An endowed deanship
gives us unique opportunities to enhance the academic mission of
the school."
Knapp is a 1979 graduate of Johns Hopkins and a university
trustee since 1997. His gift honors his father, James Barclay
Knapp, a prominent and highly decorated major general who served
for 33 years in the U.S. Army and, after it was established, the
U.S. Air Force. Gen. Knapp died earlier this year at 83, weeks
after his son told him of the establishment of the James Barclay
Knapp Deanship.
Barclay Knapp, 42, of Princeton, N.J., is president and chief
executive officer of NTL Inc. The New York- and London-based
company is one of the largest operators of cable and telephone
systems in the United Kingdom with more than 1.4 million
customers. The company also provides the U.K.'s widest range of
television, telephone and Internet services and can count
virtually all U.K. homes and businesses as customers.
Knapp is also president and CEO of CoreComm, a recently launched
U.S. version of NTL. A 1983 graduate of Harvard Business School,
he began his career by founding, with two partners, Cellular
Communications Inc., which became in 1986 the first publicly
traded cellular phone company in the United States. It eventually
was sold to what is now Airtouch.
Knapp is a founding member and former national chair of the
Second Decade Society, a leadership group of
young alumni between 10 and 20 years past their graduations from
the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
"Even before this remarkable $10 million gift, Barclay Knapp's
record of service to the school was extraordinary for any
alumnus, and especially for one who is so young," said Herbert L.
Kessler,
dean of the Krieger School, who will be the first to
occupy the Knapp Deanship. "This gift is particularly welcome,
because its benefits go to the very heart of our academic
programs."
Kessler said the first initiative he is launching through the
endowed deanship is the Woodrow Wilson Research Program, an
enhancement of Johns Hopkins' effort to provide undergraduates
with unusually extensive opportunities to do original research.
The program will offer selected students, beginning with a group
of this fall's freshmen and sophomores, $10,000 over their
undergraduate years to fund scholarly research projects under the
guidance of faculty mentors. The program is named for the only
U.S. president to hold a Ph.D., a doctorate in history earned by
Wilson at Johns Hopkins in 1886.
Gen. Knapp was a 1939 graduate of West Point who, by the time he
retired in 1972, was awarded the Silver Star, two Distinguished
Service Medals and the French Croix de Guerre. He flew 59 combat
missions in Europe during World War II. In 1969, he became chief
U.N. representative at the Korean armistice talks. In a highly
publicized April 1969 confrontation, he abruptly walked out on a
North Korean general who refused to reply to his charge that the
downing of an unarmed U.S. Navy reconnaissance plan over
the Sea of Japan was a "calculated act of aggression."
Gen. Knapp later served with the Strategic Air Command as
director of civil engineering, personnel director and chief of
staff.
The James Barclay Knapp Deanship is the second endowed deanship
in the eight academic divisions of The Johns Hopkins University.
In 1997, Frances Watt Baker and Lenox D. Baker, both physicians
and double-degree graduates of Johns Hopkins, endowed the
deanship at the School of Medicine.
Barclay Knapp's $10 million commitment counts toward the $1.2
billion goal of the Johns Hopkins
Initiative, a campaign
scheduled to conclude in June 2000. As of April 1, total
commitments to the campaign had reached $1.17 billion. Total
commitments for endowment and facilities, the primary emphases of
the campaign, were $676.2 million.
Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the
World Wide Web at
http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/
Information on automatic e-mail delivery
of science and medical news releases is available at the
same address.
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