Giving as good as you get - times two
This article was originally written by Patricia Wright in the summer of 1999 for UMass Amherst about Janice Rossbach. It is now preserved on our records here. Please read the original article on their website at this link
IT WAS THE SWASTIKA in the campus parking garage that crystallized Janice Rossbach's thinking about philanthrophy. It certainly isn't what got her started giving; she'd been doing that for years. It was because she was already a donor to UMass (as well as to that other land-grant school, MIT, where she met her husband and fellow engineer, Leo Rossbach, in 1950) that the couple were on campus that afternoon in 1996. As members of the Chancellor's Council, they'd been invited to drive over from Weston to help celebrate the dedication of W.E.B. Du Bois Library.
Janice Rossbach is a good-natured woman, and measured in her response to anti-semitism and other forms of ignorance and hatred. For example, we were startled by the fact that when she applied for college in 1945 she was rejected by both MIT and Massachusetts State. This was despite being at the top of her class at Jeremiah Burke High School for Girls in Roxbury, and so smart that she'd graduate summa cum laude in math a month after she turned twenty. (At which point she'd enter MIT.)
The then-Miss Rittenburg was not surprised by the rejections, however. "I was Jewish, I needed financial aid, and I was from the city of Boston," she says with a shrug, as if these categories explained everything. And in fact, they apparently did at the time. It took the intercession of the Jeremiah Burke principal with state education authorities to get the rejection by the state school overturned. At the genuinely sweet and leafy little campus where Janice matriculated in the fall of 1946, there was a Jewish sorority and there were other sororities, and the membership did not overlap. (Same with fraternities.)
Did these exclusions anger her, we asked Rossbach this summer, and it was her turn to be surprised. "Well, you have to understand this was right after World War II," she said. "I think I was more upset about members of my grandmother's family being killed in Europe."
But if Rossbach is realistic about which things are worth getting worked up about, she's also clear that a swastika in the parking garage is one of them. Especially at UMass, which, she says with a laugh, "I kind of think of as Shangri-la!"
This urban Jewish kid loved going to school here. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven!" she says. "I loved the barns, loved the animals; I remember when they were building Skinner Hall, seeing students walking toward it from all over campus, carrying trees!" One of her boyfriends was a poultry student, and during summer session they used to ride around on a tractor feeding the chickens. "We used to go square-dancing in South Hadley!" she says."I used to go roller-skating with the poultry club!" Rossbach's education in math, science, and life "I got a life at UMass" was the perfect basis for graduate work and her later career as a systems engineer. In 1995, the College of Engineering recognized its crossover alumna by naming her Distinguished Engineering Alumna.
Janice Rossbach always had the idea of giving back everything she'd been given and more. When she'd paid off her student loans she started "paying back" her scholarships. (At UMass she'd received the Lotta Crabtree Scholarship, established specifically because of the campus's agricultural base.) And when that was done she kept giving.
"I started thinking about giving everything back times two," says Rossbach. "That if everyone would repay all the help they've received times two, what great shape we'd be in." That her company, GTE, matched charitable gifts two-to-one was icing on the cake for Rossbach: "I love a bargain! If somebody wants to make a stereotype of that, so be it!" The matching program means that "if I give $7,500 my schools get $22,500," she says. "That's quite an incentive."
The swastika in the parking garage got her thinking that the same principle could be applied to outrage. UMass's response to the incident was "more complete than I could have expected," she says. Campus Center staff called the campus police, who in turn called the Rossbachs and were on the scene by the time they got back to their car.
But she was still upset by this sign "that somebody here was pushing things in the wrong direction." So she decided to do something as "anti-swastika" as possible. Her remedy was a gift targeted to the Science Enrichment Program, a summer program that brought talented high school students of color to campus.
"It made me feel better," says Rossbach. "It did. It takes away some of the hurt. And if every Ku Klux Klan member knew that everytime he marches, somebody else is going to give to the NAACP well, pretty soon he's not going to have much motivation."
Janice Rossbach is a good-natured woman, and measured in her response to anti-semitism and other forms of ignorance and hatred. For example, we were startled by the fact that when she applied for college in 1945 she was rejected by both MIT and Massachusetts State. This was despite being at the top of her class at Jeremiah Burke High School for Girls in Roxbury, and so smart that she'd graduate summa cum laude in math a month after she turned twenty. (At which point she'd enter MIT.)
The then-Miss Rittenburg was not surprised by the rejections, however. "I was Jewish, I needed financial aid, and I was from the city of Boston," she says with a shrug, as if these categories explained everything. And in fact, they apparently did at the time. It took the intercession of the Jeremiah Burke principal with state education authorities to get the rejection by the state school overturned. At the genuinely sweet and leafy little campus where Janice matriculated in the fall of 1946, there was a Jewish sorority and there were other sororities, and the membership did not overlap. (Same with fraternities.)
Did these exclusions anger her, we asked Rossbach this summer, and it was her turn to be surprised. "Well, you have to understand this was right after World War II," she said. "I think I was more upset about members of my grandmother's family being killed in Europe."
But if Rossbach is realistic about which things are worth getting worked up about, she's also clear that a swastika in the parking garage is one of them. Especially at UMass, which, she says with a laugh, "I kind of think of as Shangri-la!"
This urban Jewish kid loved going to school here. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven!" she says. "I loved the barns, loved the animals; I remember when they were building Skinner Hall, seeing students walking toward it from all over campus, carrying trees!" One of her boyfriends was a poultry student, and during summer session they used to ride around on a tractor feeding the chickens. "We used to go square-dancing in South Hadley!" she says."I used to go roller-skating with the poultry club!" Rossbach's education in math, science, and life "I got a life at UMass" was the perfect basis for graduate work and her later career as a systems engineer. In 1995, the College of Engineering recognized its crossover alumna by naming her Distinguished Engineering Alumna.
Janice Rossbach always had the idea of giving back everything she'd been given and more. When she'd paid off her student loans she started "paying back" her scholarships. (At UMass she'd received the Lotta Crabtree Scholarship, established specifically because of the campus's agricultural base.) And when that was done she kept giving.
"I started thinking about giving everything back times two," says Rossbach. "That if everyone would repay all the help they've received times two, what great shape we'd be in." That her company, GTE, matched charitable gifts two-to-one was icing on the cake for Rossbach: "I love a bargain! If somebody wants to make a stereotype of that, so be it!" The matching program means that "if I give $7,500 my schools get $22,500," she says. "That's quite an incentive."
The swastika in the parking garage got her thinking that the same principle could be applied to outrage. UMass's response to the incident was "more complete than I could have expected," she says. Campus Center staff called the campus police, who in turn called the Rossbachs and were on the scene by the time they got back to their car.
But she was still upset by this sign "that somebody here was pushing things in the wrong direction." So she decided to do something as "anti-swastika" as possible. Her remedy was a gift targeted to the Science Enrichment Program, a summer program that brought talented high school students of color to campus.
"It made me feel better," says Rossbach. "It did. It takes away some of the hurt. And if every Ku Klux Klan member knew that everytime he marches, somebody else is going to give to the NAACP well, pretty soon he's not going to have much motivation."
Citation
Wright, Patricia. “Generous People: Janice Rittenburg Rossbach '49.” UMass Magazine Around the Pond Summer 1999, UMass University Communications, 1999, Retrieved January 18, 2019, from www.umass.edu/umassmag/archives/1999/summer_99/summ99_aroundpond.html#anchor119163.