Carol Robbins: Tuition and travel for JFRC students
Carol Robbins attended the Rome Center in 1964-65 at the original campus located in the Casa Internazionale degli Studenti. Robbins, a graduate of Bucknell University, remembers her year at the Rome Center as the most pivotal one in her life. "It was fabulous; it was life-changing. I came back a different and better person."
For these reasons, Robbins has left the John Felice Rome Center a $200,000 bequest to create the Carol T. Robbins Roma Fellowship. The fund will provide tuition and travel assistance for Rome Center students including those who, like Robbins, do not attend Loyola University Chicago.
When Robbins attended the Rome Center, almost all students went for a full academic year. Asked what she took away from her Rome Center experience, Robbins replies, "Tolerance. More that anything else, we learned tolerance. We learned how to get along with people from totally different backgrounds who, up until that point, had been strangers."
Although Robbins recognizes the importance of academics in her experience, what she values the most is what she learned culturally, socially, and personally. "We had responsibilities and freedom that we didn't have at our respective U.S. universities," Robbins says. "I came back a little more mature and more worldly. The city of Rome is totally beguiling--Italians are fascinating people. Because of the location of the campus, we were even more able than the current generation of Rome students to integrate into the culture."
Robbins and her peers learned about life both in and outside of Rome, as the academic calendar included long breaks for travel. At the time, hitchhiking was considered an acceptable and economically-savvy medium for travel--it was so prevalent that the Rome Center administration created a student permission slip for hitchhiking, which most parents (including Robbins's) signed. "We spent a lot of weekends in Florence," says Robbins. "Half of us went to Oktoberfest in Munich by cheap trains or by hitching. We traveled all over Italy, and much of Europe. Most of my class went on a Loyola trip to the Middle East. Instead, I went on a Eurail pass with two other girls to England and Scandinavia--with bread and cheese from the school as rations! We were all very mindful of John Felice's mantra: 'Rome is your classroom, and Europe is your campus.'"
Robbins also describes learning in a very different religious environment than she was used to--she was one of a handful of non-Catholics. She cites Tom Walsh, S.J., as the most influential person from her time at the Rome Center. "He had a special sensitivity and charm that let him bond easily with the non-Catholics--through casual hallway conversations or over a cappuccino at the bar. I didn't realize until I leafed through our yearbook decades later that his title was "Spiritual Director." Without the slightest intention of converting me, he taught me a lot about Catholicism. We've seen each other often back in the United States--he even made a visit to my house. My mother has never recovered from finally meeting this priest she'd heard about, who arrived as an unusually handsome man in street clothes," Robbins remembers.
After college, Robbins settled in Boston and got a master's from Harvard. She became a city planner and worked for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and later became an independent public policy consultant. She and her husband now live in Pittsboro, North Carolina. Choral singing has become an important part of Robbins's life. She started Youth Pro Musica, a program which funds opportunities for young people to participate in choral singing--including an initiative she is now working on with Associate Dean Rebecca Edwards at the John Felice Rome Center. Robbins sings in two local choruses, and attends a choral music summer camp. "I started in fifth grade and never stopped. It's something you carry through life," she says.
Robbins says she chose to remember the Rome Center in her giving plans because she believes in the value of the program. "When I came back from Rome, I told a dean at my college that is was the most valuable time of my life. He said, 'Call back in 10 years, and we'll see if you still feel that way.' I did. You give to the things that mean the most to you, and the Rome Center and choral singing are those two things for me. I don't have enormous wealth, but people can give creatively, even with modest resources. If I can change one person's life by giving him or her this opportunity, then I'm both obliged and thrilled to do it.
