The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Hastings IDEA in the Melikian Center Endowment
Hastings IDEA in the Melikian Center Endowment
Learn more about your impact
This fund accelerates student success and creates future leaders. By giving to this fund, you help ambitious and dedicated students pursue linguistic and cultural expertise through immersive study abroad. You support their careers and help build national capacity in foreign language and area studies.
Since 2011, this fund has sent scholars to 10 countries for intensive summer language study through ASU’s Critical Languages Institute. Recipients have gone on to pursue careers in government service, higher education, international finance and health care.
Impact of donor support
The fund is the creation of Doris Hastings, who was born Doris Erickson in Minnesota in 1922 and led a remarkable life of public service and philanthropy. She passed away in 2017, after 94 well-lived years.
During World War II, she worked in Washington, D.C., for the Office for Inter-American Affairs, set up to counter German propaganda in Latin America. In this role, she collaborated with Walt Disney on animated films designed for international distribution. This showed her the importance of cross-cultural communication for diplomacy and business.
She established this fund in 2010 and included it in her estate planning. Thanks to those who share her commitment to passing on skills that are vital in building peace and security, the fund now supports five students each summer.
My time in Kosovo was simultaneously the most rewarding and the most difficult period of my life. I sat with, and often cried with, massacre survivors and people who had lost everything. My doctoral dissertation became more than a research project, but a way to start to tell these stories and to bring a human face to ethnic cleansing.”