News about the Great Ideas Tour

Every January, the University of Alabama Awards Committee faces the challenging task of selecting the recipients of the University's four premier student awards. To be honored with the Sullivan, the Ramsey, the Mayer, or the Bloom is to have earned a crowning mark of distinction. But winning the John Fraser Ramsey Award not only bestows recognition and a cash award on the recipient, it also makes that student the newest member of the Ramsey Family, an amazingly diverse tribe of previous recipients, lifelong friends and former students of the Capstone's late, legendary "Doc" Ramsey. In celebration of their mentor's love of life and learning and his remarkable generosity, the family presents their new relation with a welcoming gift of round-trip trans-Atlantic airfare, a Eurailpass and connections to "relatives" in the countries whose history John Ramsey taught so memorably at the University from 1935 to 1977. The tour was the brainchild of two members of the board of directors of the Ramsey Award, Jim Caldwell, '61, MBA '68, and John Harris, '79. The desire that motivated them is a refrain in the family: to make the same difference for new generations of students that John Ramsey made for them. And in a world where international understanding is an increasingly necessary skill as well as a source of cultural enrichment, the Great Ideas Tour can make a significant difference in a student's life.

—Jan Duvall

Read the rest of Jan Duvall's article from the Alumni Magazine, Fall 1998.

In 1973, between my freshman and sophomore years at the University, I spent the summer travelling in Europe. With the exception of two days in Bimini and a half hour in Juarez I had never previously been out of the United States. Armed with a passport with the ink barely dry, a Eurail Pass, a still pristine copy of Europe-on-$5-a-Day and $600 in travelers checks ($150 of which was a gift from John Ramsey), I boarded a commercial airliner for the first time in my life. Seven hours later I arrived in London, disoriented, bewildered, intimidated and wonderfully excited. The following three months, along with the early months of my second European stay (begun in 1977 and still continuing), were certainly the most formative periods of my life.

—John Harris

Read the rest of the "John Harris Letters."