The College Board of Governors
Member Profile: Maria O. Grant
Campaign Co-Chair
(Fall 2002 Newsletter)
[interview below]
 Growing
up as a child of the Big Apple, Maria Ophuls lived just around
the corner from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After school
each day, if the weather was good, she would play in Central
Park; if it was bad, she would head to the museum. She would
also attend the Saturday museum workshops.
No surprise then that the woman who co-chairs Thomas Aquinas
College's Comprehensive Campaign is also a long-time docent
and overseer of the famed Huntington Library, Art Collections,
and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA.
For more than 17 years, Maria has been giving tours at the
Huntington - tours of American art, British and French 18th
and 19th century art, the 200 acre gardens, and special library
exhibitions covering such areas as Anglo-American history
and literature, the American West, and 19th century photography.
More than 2,500 scholars, and 500,000 visitors from around
the world come to the library each year.
Maria has worn many hats at the Huntington, including that
of a docent trainer and volunteer research assistant. Currently,
she is Overseer Vice- Chair and one of 60 Overseers who, along
with five Trustees, have overall management responsibility
of the library, museum, and garden complex. Since 1998, she
has also been a tour guide at the nearby Norton Simon Museum,
which holds an overview of Western arts in paintings and sculpture
and a collection of Southeast Asian art. She is also President
of the Virginia Steel Scott Foundation, which built the Scott
Gallery of American Art at the Huntington Library.
Maria left New York at age 13 and moved with her mother to
San Marino, CA, following her mother's remarriage. She attended
a college preparatory boarding school (Madeira) in McLean,
Virginia, where she cultivated a life-long passion for horses.
For much of her life thereafter, she showed hunters and jumpers.
In 1962, she enrolled at Stanford University, eventually
graduating with a major in Near Eastern History and a minor
in English Literature. She stayed at Stanford, obtaining a
Master's Degree in Education, and then pursued doctoral work
in a new field: African Studies with a concentration in Medieval
East Africa and the Swahili City States.
About this same time, she began dating a long-time family
friend, Richard Grant, who had graduated from Stanford the
June before she entered, served time in the Army, attended
law school, and then become a journalist. They married, and
Maria cut short her academic work to raise a family in Pasadena,
where Richard was working as an editor for California Tomorrow,
a statewide environmental planning organization. Daughters
Gillian and Elena were then born and Maria became primarily
a homemaker.
She also got her first taste of charitable work. Through
a friend of Richard's, Maria became a Board member and eventually
President of the Pasadena Mental Health Association, a crisis
counseling center that used professionally-supervised volunteers
to provide mental health services for needy individuals. "I
loved the experience. The positive effects were tangible,
and I got great insights into how an effective board works."
Meanwhile, Richard, forged his first association in philanthropy
as a board member of the Dan Murphy Foundation. Richard's
father had helped its founders, Daniel and Bernardine Donohue,
to establish the Foundation in 1957 in memory of Bernardine's
father to assist important Roman Catholic and other philanthropic
causes. The Foundation was so helpful to the Church that the
Donohues became the first Americans ever to be given by a
pope the titles of "Papal Count" and "Papal
Countess."
Countess Donohue died unexpectedly in 1968, and the work
of the Foundation since then has been carried out under the
leadership of Sir Daniel Donohue. Richard has been a Trustee
since 1970 and has been its Secretary-Treasurer since 1972.
Earlier this year, Maria joined the board as well.
While Maria now has a full plate of outside activities, she
had dedicated the intervening years to the raising of their
two daughters. It was while her daughters were growing up
that she became involved with the Huntington. "Returning
to art was the perfect thing for me," she said. "I
could do it while the girls were in school and not have it
interfere with our family life." She also had been active
in her daughters' schools, serving on the boards of Westridge
School and Mayfield Senior School, where she was involved
in fundraising and development efforts. She currently serves
on the board of Don Bosco Technical Institute, a Los Angeles
Catholic high school that combines college preparatory work
with technical training.
Moreover, she has been active in her parish life at St. Andrews
Church in Pasadena, ever since her conversion to Catholicism
just after marrying Richard. She has taught third grade CCD
for many years and confirmation classes for six years. She
also serves as a lector there.
In 1998, she joined the College's Board of Governors. Last
fall, she agreed to co-chair the College's Comprehensive Campaign,
along with the Hon. William P. Clark.
Interview with Maria O. Grant:
Q. How did you come to learn about Thomas Aquinas College?
A. Through Richard. He had visited the campus several times
and in 1993 attended one of the Great Books Summer Seminars.
He urged me to go the following year. I did and was enormously
impressed. I returned later when school was in session to
visit.
Q. What impressed you?
A. Everything. The mode of learning, the seriousness of the
intellectual life, the zeal for the faith, the joy of the
students, the beauty of the campus. I could go on and on.
Q. You are a Stanford graduate. Why would you be interested
in helping Thomas Aquinas College?
A. One of the great things about America is the range of
college choices. When you look at the spectrum of colleges
that exists here, as opposed to, say, in Europe, you see that
we have a huge number of options available.
Thomas Aquinas College is a very American college, because
it is a niche college. It does things that no other college
does. What Thomas Aquinas College has done is taken a great
idea, perfected it, and found its own market.
First, it has an extraordinarily strong Catholic nature,
and, second, it has an extraordinarily strong academic nature.
The academics - how can it be better? The Catholicity - how
can it be better? Plus, you have a faculty unified behind
the founders' vision and not fractured in interdepartmental
warfare.
Moreover, because everyone here studies the same curriculum,
students have a body of shared knowledge that allows them
to all converse with each other. When I was at Stanford, I
had classmates with whom I had nothing whatsoever in common;
we had nothing intellectual to talk about. Here, the very
thing that unites students and faculty is a common intellectual
life - a life concerned with understanding the most important
things in life.
Q. What do you see is the biggest challenge for the College?
A. To build the campus in a difficult economic time. Everything
about the college is strong: Its admissions, its retention
rate, its reputation. On every rating you look at, and by
any objective you compare it against, the College is doing
extraordinarily well. Graduates come out of the College singularly
well-educated, and then, formed as Catholics, shine as beacons
of light to the whole world, and to whatever community they
go.
But our problem in the short-term is money. Right now, we
have all the students we can handle, but we don't have the
facilities to accommodate them. The dining room in the Commons
is filled to capacity. But we can't expand the dining room
until we build our Chapel. So, we need a chapel. But we can't
build the Chapel until we build an administration building
to make room for Chapel construction. But raising money for
an administration building is not very glamorous. And yet,
we have to do it, if we're ultimately going to build our Chapel.
Q. What was your reaction on becoming Campaign Co-Chair?
A. I was thrilled. Of course, I've got a great co-chair in
Bill Clark. But also, this is a wonderful moment in the history
of the College. By every parameter in which you measure success,
the College is successful. So that gives me great confidence.
I'm also supremely confident in Tom Dillon and his leadership.
He is passionate and single-minded in his devotion to the
success of the school. And I have great admiration for the
College founders. They took a great leap of faith in establishing
this College. It was a risky thing for them to do. But they
had a crystal clear vision about what they wanted to do. They
assumed the risks, they worked hard, they prayed hard, and
they brought the College to this point. It is up to us on
the present Board of Governors to finish the work they started.
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Fall 2002
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