The gift not only benefits the school directly but also offers up to $4 million in matching funds to encourage renewed and new philanthropy toward critical areas for SAIS Europe.

Areas covered include faculty (in particular, for the expansion of the existing Kenneth H. Keller Professorship and the C. Grove Haines Chair, which will support current Bologna faculty members), students (fellowships, internships, and co-curricular experiential activities, such as study trips and career treks), integration and new programming (online teaching, new one-year programs, faculty exchanges between Johns Hopkins SAIS campuses and Johns Hopkins’ main campus in Baltimore), and the COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund (to support those in the SAIS Europe community with financial needs, expanded technology to enhance virtual delivery of courses and seminars, and other resources necessary to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic).

“This extraordinary gift celebrates the 65th anniversary of the founding of SAIS Europe and provides the center a unique opportunity to recover from this challenging year and look forward with optimism,” says Director Michael G. Plummer. “This is a call to action to the many Bolognesi in the world, and we hope that their response will be equally overwhelming.”

To learn more about the matching opportunities, please contact the Office of Development.

The announcement came on the occasion of a public virtual lecture hosted by SAIS Europe with Romano Prodi, former president of the European Commission, on “The World Economy after Covid-19.”

The professorship honors Abernethy, a Johns Hopkins emeritus trustee and member of the Johns Hopkins SAIS Board of Advisors and SAIS Europe Advisory Council. With this new professorship, the second-largest gift in Abernethy’s lifetime to one of the Johns Hopkins schools, Abernethy intends to support teaching and research in global affairs with particular regard to the development of democratic institutions and constitutional studies around the world.

The professorship will be held by Prodi for a two-year period starting in fall 2020. Prodi is a former president of the European Commission (1999–2004) and former prime minister of Italy (1996–98; 2006–08). Prodi is a longtime friend of SAIS Europe and an honorary member of the Bologna Advisory Council.

Thanks to Abernethy’s generosity, students at SAIS Europe will benefit from Prodi’s extensive expertise in international affairs and as a world leader. With the launch of the new Master of Arts in European Public Policy at SAIS Europe, Prodi’s presence on the faculty “will certainly provide great leadership and prestige to the new program and to its students,” says MEPP Director Michael Leigh.

“We were in Dubai for the Chinese New Year, and people were already scared. You could feel it everywhere,” says Nijkerk, a member of the SAIS Dean’s Advisory Board who lives with his wife in Singapore, where he manages the Asia operations of his family’s industrial IT company.

In early February, Singapore went into lockdown, with gatherings banned and masks mandatory. Offices and nonessential businesses moved to “work from home.” So when Nijkerk traveled to New York later that month for a Dean’s Advisory Board meeting, he remembers “being the grim person at the table. Everybody else was more optimistic about how the pandemic would affect the U.S. But the [SAIS] administration understood the gravity, given that SAIS Europe and the Nanjing centers already had closed, and they committed to immediately creating a contingency plan. Three weeks later, in mid-March, we got the announcement that the DC campus would shut down, effective immediately.”

Nijkerk’s wife and two children were in the U.S. at the time and promptly returned to Singapore. In the process, Nijkerk thought about the SAIS students who might not have the financial resources to cope with sudden dislocation.

“I thought of unexpected moving expenses coinciding with lost jobs, lost family income, so I reached out to the board’s chair and vice chair, Todd Fisher and Kathy Pike, and it was literally just a couple of emails and the board immediately stepped up and created the COVID-19 Student Emergency Fund.”

Noemi Crespo Rice, assistant dean of student affairs, was assigned the job of managing the fund. It meant immediately creating a set of guidelines and a simple but fair application process, plus organizing a committee of six other SAIS administrators who would meet weekly to evaluate the applications and get the funds to students as soon as possible.

“Because we have campuses in China and Italy, the COVID-19 crisis hit us much earlier than most other American institutions,” says Crespo Rice. “By the end of February, we had already closed both our Nanjing and Bologna campuses. Most students chose to flee immediately to wherever they were from, many leaving behind all of their belongings.”

Students were frantic for help. Many had incurred debt paying for last-minute plane tickets and moving expenses, some had lost internet access, some were running out of money for rent and groceries.

“Our students are so special, and some of their stories have been heartbreaking,” Crespo Rice says. “I find myself weeping with them on the phone. But the advisory board and the many other donors who stepped up have been amazing. We have awarded more than $120,000 to more than 140 students since March.”

The average grant of nearly $1,000 has helped students recover belongings from the campuses they left, helped them pay for gas and groceries, and even for internet access to continue their studies online. One Nigerian student was able to graduate on time in May only because the fund helped cover in-home child care and rent when DC child care centers and her family’s business in Nigeria were shuttered by the pandemic.

Because of the continued uncertainty and subsequent economic fallout for students, SAIS plans to continue raising money for and managing the emergency fund through the 2020–21 academic year.

“Dean Eliot Cohen has committed a significant chunk of his discretionary fund in a matching effort to raise more money,” Crespo Rice says. “The students are so grateful, and it just warms your heart. We’re just hoping that five years from now, they can reflect back on this time and say, ‘Yes, it was difficult, but SAIS had my back,’ and that this fund was just one of many tools we used to show them we care about them.”

Nijkerk says he is gratified by how quickly SAIS rose to the occasion. “It’s a great tribute to our board and administration,” he says. “In unprecedented times, one needs to act without hesitation.” Joan Katherine Cramer