Championing Grinnell students
April 30, 2025 — President Anne F. Harris wants Grinnell students to know that she is always rooting for them.
Through a gift to Grinnell College, Harris and her husband, Professor of Art History Michael Mackenzie, have created the Emmett and Pierrette Harris Endowed Scholarship, which honors Harris’ parents and benefits under-resourced students at Grinnell College.
“This scholarship means somebody’s cheering you on, and somebody who hasn’t even met you champions you and believes in you,” Harris explains.
President Anne F. Harris and Professor of Art History Michael Mackenzie recently established an endowed scholarship in honor of Anne’s parents.
For Harris, honoring her parents in this way is a powerful thing because her father, Emmett, benefitted so much from educational opportunities through the GI Bill. Emmett was born in 1920 and grew up on a rural, coastal farm in North Carolina, where his education began in a one-room schoolhouse. When the Great Depression hit, he joined the U.S. Navy at just 17 years of age.
After service in World War II, Emmett attended Columbia University with support from the GI Bill. As a 27-year-old first-generation college student, it was a new and unfamiliar environment for him.
“He was not of the world of Columbia University at all,” Harris says. “Nobody in his family had gone to college, ever.” Nevertheless, Emmett thrived at Columbia and, after graduation, went on to a successful career in banking and later teaching international business at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Harris says the GI Bill made her father’s career possible. Later, he supported Harris’ professional trajectory, creating a positive ripple effect across future generations. “It really demonstrated the intergenerational transformative power of education. And my father cared about education above everything else.”
Emmett passed away in 2012, and Harris says the scholarship is a way of honoring and remembering him, as well as her mother, Pierrette, who is thrilled about the scholarship.
“Emmett is in our hearts,” Mackenzie says. “He was a beautiful, kind, wonderful man who always, always, always believed in education.”
A locket with the photos of Emmett and Pierrette Harris is displayed.
He adds, “He was really warm and embracing and accepting, and also just such a great combination of kind, dignified, and intellectually curious.” In fact, Emmett encouraged his daughter and son-in-law’s graduate studies in art history, holding to the maxim “study what you will never have all the answers to.”
Emmett and Pierrette met in 1957. She was born and educated in Switzerland and worked in the secretarial pool of various Swiss embassies. In the spring of 1967 in New York City, Harris says, “She was late to church, and he was the usher. Three weeks later, they were engaged to be married.”
Like her husband, Pierrette is a strong proponent of education. “She continues to cheer on our kids now, and their educational journeys,” Harris says. “When I told her, ‘We want to honor both of you in this scholarship with your names together,’ that moved her, too.”
There is so much love and emotion in this gift, Mackenzie says, as well as joy in giving for the benefit of students.
Harris agrees. She even loves the meaning and origins of the word philanthropy, which come from the Greek words for “love” and “people.” “It is so much my hope that our students know they don’t walk alone when they’re in this intense, marvelous, incredible educational environment.”
Harris and Mackenzie are delighted to have created a scholarship at Grinnell College, an institution that strives to make college accessible through need-blind admission and driving down student loan debt. “By creating an endowed scholarship, we’re joining hundreds of Grinnellians to champion our students, and the collective force of that is its own inspiration,” Harris says. When an endowed scholarship is established, the earnings from that gift provide a permanent source of support for financial aid.
Mackenzie adds, “It’s an investment in one generation’s hope for the next generation.”
—by Jackie Stolze