‘I Wanted to Give Back’

Renowned scholar establishes endowed scholarship fund for first-generation students at the Rutgers Honors College.

As a lifelong scholar and author renowned for his work in international relations, Richard A. Melanson says he hit his stride and felt most at home connecting with students in a career that spanned five decades.

Richard Melanson RC'66

Melanson, a Woodbridge, New Jersey native who earned his undergraduate degree in political science at Rutgers College in 1966, is still making profound connections with students, thanks to a substantial financial gift he and partner Mary Matthews recently made to the Honors College at Rutgers–New Brunswick. The Richard A. Melanson Endowed Scholarship will support academically gifted, first-generation college students who face financial hardships. 

When Melanson and Matthews visited the Honors College last year to meet scholarship recipients, he learned just how vital his gift would be.

“One of the students told me ‘I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you’,” Melanson says. “I was really, really impressed with them. I thought they were smart and admirable human beings. The whole experience of meeting them brought a tear to my eye.” 

A Career in the Classroom

Melanson taught at a half-dozen colleges over four decades, including UCLA, Kenyon College, Brown University, and the National War College, and he is still an instructor at the Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning at Duke University. The first class he taught—Introduction to American Foreign Policy at UCLA in 1972—was a bit daunting. With 400 students, Melanson says he had jitters beforehand. 

“It was a giant lecture hall and I was scared to death,” he says. “I got my act together, eventually. By the end of the term, when I would come out on stage, the front row of students would start to sing the Johnny Carson theme song. I would come out and pretend to swing a golf club the way Johnny did.”

Melanson built on that for an exceptional career. “I was a natural teacher,” he says. “I could talk about very serious things but also injected some humor, and that engaged the students in a way that I don't think we’re used to.”

Melanson, who lives in the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina area, led a master class presentation in 2023 on the war in Ukraine at the Honors College at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. 

When he first learned of the Honors College at his alma mater, he reached out to administrators to learn a little more and liked what he heard. 

“I really liked the sense of community, the sense of diversity, and the size of the Honors College,” Melanson says. “It reminded me of when I was at Rutgers.”

Founded in 2015, the Honors College at Rutgers–New Brunswick is a community of more than 1,650 high-achieving students focused on a shared mission of “doing well by doing good.” Melanson, ever the researcher, learned that the Honors College was among the most prestigious in the country and it sparked the idea for a scholarship. 

“I decided I wanted to give back,” he says. 

Invaluable Support for Students

Camila Correa, a 2024 Honors College graduate who benefited from the Melanson scholarship, says the generosity eased a major burden for her family. 

“I saw my parents have to deal with the stress of finances and funding, the struggle to put my older sister through college,” says Correa, who majored in political science and minored in French. “Having that funding that we’ve all benefited from was a big weight off our shoulders.”

Mary Matthews and Melanson on the College Avenue Campus

Correa, now a graduate student at Rutgers, met Melanson and Matthews on another visit the couple made to Rutgers. (Matthews, a retired telecommunications executive, has been in a domestic partnership with Melanson since 2003.)

“I told them how much I appreciate their commitment to us,” Correa says. 

J.D. Bowers, dean of the Honors College, also is grateful for Melanson’s commitment to students.

“Richard’s gift stems from his long-standing affinity and engagement with the Honors College,” Bowers says. “The fact that he wants to support our students is a testament to the potential he sees in them. It truly is a major gift, not only through his level of assistance, but through his level of commitment and his recognition of their talents.”

A Road through Rutgers

One would assume that Melanson, who authored notable books—including Writing History and Making Policy and American Foreign Policy since the Vietnam War: The Search for Consensus from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush—sailed through high school and that he thrived at Harvard Law School after studying political science at Rutgers. That wasn’t the case, though. High school was a struggle, he says, until he joined the debate team. He says law school was simply a mistake.

“I found it boring, tedious, hard, and mostly irrelevant to what my interests were,” he says. 

Melanson left Harvard for Johns Hopkins University, to pursue a Ph.D. in international relations, then embarked on his teaching career. 

His freshman year at Rutgers was a bit intimidating too. For the entire year, he and his classmates had to wear black beanies, known as “dinks,” which had red stripes on the side and a little red button on top. He recalls the “Dean of Men” warning that few of them would last the first semester. 

“I went home and I called my parents and I said, ‘I’m not sure what I’ve gotten myself into’.” 

He survived the semester and says that influential professors, such as Josef Silverstein, later guided his interest in international relations. As a Henry Rutgers Scholar, Melanson wrote a 200-page thesis on Singapore’s withdrawal from the Federation of Malaysia under Silverstein's guidance. Silverstein also was instrumental in advising him to enroll in the international relations doctoral program at Johns Hopkins.

Melanson says joining Phi Sigma Kappa, “the most diverse fraternity on campus,” opened his world and, for decades, that foundation followed him. 

“No matter where I went, I always had a soft spot in my heart for Rutgers because of the first-class education that I got there.” 

For more about Melanson, read his oral history interview from 2017 in the Rutgers Oral History Archives.