About & History

The Endeavor Foundation Center for Faculty Development is supported by a generous endowment from the Endeavor Foundation. The Diane and Michael Maher Chair of Distinguished Teaching makes it possible for a Rollins faculty member to work collaboratively with the Director to enhance faculty development programming.

The Center was originally called the Christian A. Johnson Institute for Effective Teaching, which was established and endowed at Rollins College in the 1990s by The Endeavor Foundation. The Endeavor Foundation was established in 1952 in New York by Mr. Christian A. Johnson, a financier who had wide-ranging interests and involvements and derived great personal pleasure from nurturing the curiosity and intellectual development of young people. A director of the American Natural Gas Company who was centrally involved in the creation of the Public Utility Holding Act of 1939, Mr. Johnson was a Swedish immigrant who maintained a lifelong interest in education, medical research, and youth development. He also was an advocate of the free enterprise system and the study of economics. He established The Endeavor Foundation to help others achieve their aspirations and make a contribution to society.

Mr. Johnson passed away in 1964. For many years, his daughter, Mrs. Julie Johnson Kidd, has served as The Endeavor Foundation’s president, treasurer, and a member of its board trustees. Although Mrs. Kidd has asserted that The Endeavor Foundation’s grantmaking “has always emanated from the principles by which my father lived his life,” the Foundation’s outstanding impacts over the decades rightfully are attributed to her as much as to her father. Recognized as a lifelong advocate for and supporter of liberal arts education, Mrs. Kidd has served on the boards of trustees of several colleges in the United States and Europe, as well as of the Trust for Mutual Understanding; received honorary degrees from Marlboro College and her alma mater, Middlebury College; and was instrumental in launching the European College of the Liberal Arts and the International School of Liberal Arts. She also was a founding trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, chaired the board of the Museum of the American Indian, and received the James Smithson Medal from the Smithsonian Institution, the Council of Independent Colleges’ Award for Volunteerism and Philanthropy, and the University of Warsaw Medal of Honor, among other honors.

Mrs. Kidd, working closely with Rollins College’s 13th president, Dr. Rita Bornstein, was a driving force behind The Endeavor Foundation’s generous gifts to establish and endow at Rollins the Christian A. Johnson Institute for Effective Teaching. In Richard Hersh and John Merrow’s 2015 book Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk, Mrs. Kidd was quoted that although in some ways American higher education has lost its bearings, “Pockets of excellence do exist, particularly among the small liberal arts colleges, where some students are transformed and broadened in thrilling ways.” She also told The Foundation Center in an interview several years ago that The Endeavor Foundation has chosen liberal arts education as its primary area of focus based in part on her father’s and her “life-long passion for the challenges of what it means to educate each generation of young people, to educate them in a way that liberates them from narrow, prejudiced, and superstitious thinking and allows them to blossom into their best and most complete and positive selves, thus inspiring intellectual and emotional growth throughout their lives. What could be more important than this? This is a passion that I shared with my father and have continued to feel throughout my life.”