“There was not a defining moment as much as a gradual embracing on my part as I learned more about the program,” begins Roby Robinson, Atlanta native, 1962 graduate of the College of Arts & Sciences, retired president of The Robinson-Humphrey Company, and longtime benefactor of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. “I had been an officer in the Atlanta Alumni Club, and had been active on the local committee for the DuPont Scholarship, the merit-based predecessor to the Jefferson. When the Alumni Association began talking about creating a new program, I was an early embracer of the program.”
A part of Robinson’s motivation was borne of tragedy. On June 3, 1962 – graduation morning in Charlottesville for Robinson and his classmates – he was awakened early by a phone call informing him that his parents had been killed in an airplane crash in Paris. The Chateau de Sully charter crash killed 130, most of whom were prominent Atlanta arts patrons and civic leaders. “I had lost my parents the day I graduated in 1962. They loved the University, even though Dad had gone to Yale. So I agreed in 1987 to establish a Jefferson Scholarship in my parents’ names.”
Beginning in the late 1980s, Robinson did what so many Jefferson Scholars supporters have done: he got more involved. Rotations on the Atlanta Regional Selection Committee and Jefferson Scholars Selection Committee were followed by a term on the Board of Directors. All the while Robinson learned more about the Foundation’s operations, fiscal oversight, and vision for the future, which led to his playing a part in the decision to start the Jefferson Scholars Graduate Fellowship program.
Robinson served as president of the Alumni Association in 1996-97. That year, Dean of the College Mel Leffler presented to the Board of Managers the concept of a graduate fellowship program modeled after the Jefferson Scholarship that would attract the best and brightest graduate students to the University. “I was especially enamored of that idea because in my early years at the University we had outstanding graduate student teachers and I remembered the well,” Robinson recalled. “Some of the younger guys were so much fun; they would say to us ‘come over to my apartment and talk about this novel or that author,’ and make it a fun way to learn. Their involvement with the undergraduate student body was very important. So much of the undergraduate experience depended on getting the best graduate students, and still does.”
Robinson readily admits that his early days at the University were not distinguished academically. But he is equally quick to note that the care and concern shown by a young English professor, Irby Cauthen, set him on the proper path. “Irby Cauthen, who later became dean of the College, was the person who ensured I graduated from the University of Virginia. [He] threw me a lifeline. There was no one who had a bigger impact on my life.”
Given his feelings for graduate students and a certain English professor, it is little surprise, perhaps, that in 1999 Roby Robinson committed to fund the Irby Cauthen Jefferson Graduate Fellowship.
In Robinson’s case, with a record of support for both the undergraduate and graduate programs, there was one thing left to do: a planned gift. In 2006 he established a charitable remainder trust (CRT) to add funding to both the undergraduate scholarship and the graduate fellowship and ensure their long-term viability.
Half of the CRT funds will be used for the Roby and Louise C. Robinson Jefferson Scholarship, and half for the Irby Cauthen Jefferson Fellowship.
“I think it’s outstanding what we’ve done so far with these programs. One thing leads to another: if you attract the best and the brightest, they will require that you attract the best and brightest instructors.”
