The Education Changing Lives and Times (ECLAT) Foundation, a Dallas-based nonprofit organization that was created to provide scholarships and other educational opportunities to Chinese, Taiwanese and Asian American students, will provide funds to complete a $1 million endowment to the Naveen Jindal School of Management. A ceremony was held March 22 to recognize that gift and to rename the Jindal School’s atrium to the ECLAT Foundation Atrium.
Dr. Hasan Pirkul, Caruth Chair and dean of the Jindal School, opened the festivities in the Davidson Auditorium by saying that the close ties between the Asian community and The University of Texas at Dallas stem from the work that Texas Instruments and other Texas businesses did in the 1960s in founding the University and investing in Asia.
“Many people don’t know this, but Halliburton and Dresser Industries were funding scholarships and so the first students that came out of China ended up here in Dallas,” he said. “The roots of the community [are] strong and the numbers are even stronger now. And it all goes back to very early cooperation between our school and the community, so it’s great to see that the community is giving back to the school, to our university.”
Pirkul said that the endowment will grow over time and will support thousands of students over the years.
“Many, many years after we are gone, this particular endowment will be supporting students and changing their lives,” he said. “I can’t think of anything else that’s more meaningful than creating an endowment at an educational institution.”
Voelker said his dream as mayor is that when international students come to UT Dallas for an education, they get implanted into the community, they understand the environment and they stay here.
“But if they don’t stay here and they go home, my dream is that they’ll continue to come back and forth — that we’ll have bilateral communications, bilateral trade that will have a shared culture,” he said.
Voelker described the city’s relationship with the Global Development Initiative, a collaboration between the City of Richardson, the Richardson Chamber of Commerce/Richardson Economic Development Partnership and the Jindal School’s Center for Global Business in which JSOM students work as consultants to international business to perform market studies for potential entry into the North Texas marketplace.
Voelker said that “some very bright students from all over the world help businesses from all over the world come here and explore the North American marketplace, try to decide how they might enter this marketplace… I can promise you that the research these students do is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they do it for free.”
Hubert Zydorek, director of the Jindal School’s undergraduate and graduate international business programs and who works with the Jindal School’s community partners to administer the GDI, introduced Jane Jan, who co-founded ECLAT with her husband, Dr. Yih-Min Jan.
Jane Jan said that ECLAT, after its 10-year anniversary, wanted to make the organization more sustainable and benefit more students in the future.
“[Our] board came up with an idea,” she said. “We wanted to team up with Naveen Jindal School of Management to set up an endowment fund for the international students as our first step. Maybe we will have more but … this is the first small step we did.”
“Gifts such as the one from ECLAT are an example of how the community can work alongside a top-tier public research institution,” said Melissa Bettis, interim assistant dean, development and alumni relations. “Such partnerships provide access to higher education opportunities for the leaders of tomorrow.”
