University Trustee
In addition to his business work, Erskine served on the Board of Trustees of the University of Notre Dame, where his son Albert, Jr. studied. The university awarded him an honorary LL.D. in 1924. He took a strong interest in college football (a later Studebaker brand, the Rockne, was named after Notre Dame's football coach of the time), and initiated the Albert Russel Erskine Award for the best team of the year. The winner was chosen by a panel whose methods are, in essence, still used to select the champion team. He was instrumental in a grant of $10,000 that the Studebaker Corporation made to Harvard University in 1926, to set up the Albert Russel Erskine Bureau for Street Traffic Research, which remained active through much of the 1930s.
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“I am not willing to be drawn further into the toils. I cannot accede to the acceptance of gifts upon terms which take the educational policy of the university out of the hands of the Trustees and Faculty and permit it to be determined by those who give money.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)