Gifts in Action - James Beck

MEET JAMES BECK

Jim Beck was the first in his family to go to college. He went to Purdue at first, where he ran out of money after a few years. After serving during the Korean War, he was able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill to finish his undergraduate degree and this time, headed to the University of California at Berkeley, with some monetary assistance from his uncle to make the trip. Beck excelled at Berkeley, graduating with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa, but soon found out that the only job he could get paid only $350 per month.

Although he had never considered graduate school and was taken aback when someone suggested it, Beck quickly realized that getting his doctorate was the next logical step. So, he identified the four top schools, which included Illinois and made his decision. “I only applied to Illinois,” he said. “Illinois was the number one graduate school in chemistry, graduates of the program ran companies and were not just good chemists but good managers and leaders.”

He got a Roger Adams fellowship, which let him start his research immediately and joined Dr. Kenneth Rinehart’s lab. This was the beginning of Beck’s interest in antibiotics research. After earning his doctorate at Illinois in 1961 and a post-doc in Zurich, Beck returned to the U.S. and worked for Eli Lilly his entire career. That career led to 48 U.S. patents and 35 scientific publications. He retired in 1988.

HOW HE GAVE

Beck has endowed scholarships and fellowships in both chemistry and microbiology. His gifts will ultimately total in the seven figures. “Well, I figure I can’t take it with me,” he says with typical understatement. Students at the University of Illinois, both undergraduate and graduate, in chemistry and microbiology, are the happy beneficiaries of James Beck’s largesse. Beck recognizes that the fields of chemistry and microbiology are converging as more and more genetic information is discovered. The two fields together do the kinds of work that Beck did throughout his career. By establishing these scholarship and fellowship programs, Beck has been looking to the future, but he also enjoys looking into the past. Since retiring he has become interested in genealogy and in colonial history.

WHY HE GAVE

Beck’s motivation to give to Illinois came out of his own hardships as a student. It was only when Beck started having to withdraw money from his IRA in 1997 that he thought about making large gifts to his alma mater.

WHAT HE SAYS

“I didn’t really need the money much so I thought I would give it to charity. The first scholarship I thought of on my own. Since I had such a difficult problem paying for college as an undergraduate, I assumed there were a lot of poor kids getting left out of chemistry and microbiology,” says Beck. Later, after establishing the Beck scholarship program for undergraduates, Beck came to visit campus and learned that, these days, graduate students face more hardships than undergraduates in paying for their education. So he turned around and funded fellowships as well.