Friends of Alice R. Manicur
Dr. Alice R. Manicur Study Abroad Scholarship
The close friends, former students, and colleagues of Dr. Alice R. Manicur have created a memorial scholarship in tribute to Dr. Manicur’s passion for travel and the impact it has on one’s life experience through study abroad. This Fund will support scholarships for students who may not otherwise have the opportunity to study abroad without financial assistance.
Dr. Manicur was Frostburg’s very first dean of students, hired in 1960 immediately after she earned her doctorate in higher education administration from Indiana University, and ultimately became the vice president for Student and Educational Services. Many of the student services at FSU today had their roots in programs she began, including career services, residence hall programming, the honors convocation, the Introduction to Higher Ed course, the Cultural Events Series, and national service programs through AmeriCorps. In particular, Preview FSU, the summer orientation program, had its roots in the Summer Planning Conference she created in the 1960s, which served as the model for institutions of higher education across the nation.
She has been honored many times: The multi-use room in the Lane University Center was named in her honor in 2000. She was inducted to the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame in 2012. She was the first female president of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, the organization now known as NASPA – Student Affairs Professionals in Higher Education. That organization honored her with the Scott Goodnight Award for Outstanding Performance as a Dean, the Pillar of the Profession Award, the John L. Blackburn Distinguished Pillar Award, and in the naming of its annual conference for women aspiring to leadership in student affairs as the Alice Manicur Symposium.
“The Dean,” as she was affectionately known by students during much of her career at Frostburg State University, was born in McDowell County, West Virginia, one of six children in the Manicur family. A coal miner’s daughter, Alice developed a lifelong respect for learning. To her immigrant father and her first-generation Italian mother, education was the finest opportunity in this country, and they recognized it as the way to improve the lives of their children. Dr. Manicur’s humble background is both a tribute to her indelible belief in the power of human persistence and the enduring benefits which are derived from those who provide consistent encouragement and support. In Alice’s case, she internalized the value of supporting others in the same way she had been supported during her formative years. The end result is that she made an enormous and lasting impact on the lives of generations of students.
A pioneer in her profession, Alice Manicur was an adventurer in life, traversing the globe and extending her passion for lifelong learning in an unquenchable thirst to understand the world’s many cultures. Dr. Manicur, in a recorded interview with Dr. Scott Oliver in December 2008, described where her passion for travel originated: “In the sixth and seventh grade, I fell in love with the National Geographic, because I could see the parts of the world that I could not visit or anything. And I had a lust to adventure out and to know more than I know or knew at that time.” There was little left of the Earth’s terrain that Dr. Manicur did not visit before her passing in 2017.