UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – A seven-figure estate commitment from Penn State graduate and longtime volunteer Bob Houston has established an endowed scholarship to support students affiliated with the U.S. armed forces. The Robert J. Houston Military Excellence Scholarship in the Eberly College of Science will be awarded annually from an eligibility pool that includes undergraduate and graduate students who are enrolled in ROTC, whose parents are military veterans or who are themselves veterans of military service.
“Bob has been a trusted adviser to the college and an active business recruiter of our graduates, and that mutual bond of trust endures because he knows the rigor of our curricula and the sterling quality of our faculty and programs,” said Tracy Langkilde, Verne M. Willaman Dean of the Eberly College of Science. “Now, this extraordinary gift is deepening his legacy at the college by creating a permanent reserve of resources for military families. Bob’s generosity will provide important support for our students for generations to come.”
Houston’s scholarship has been designed to ease the financial burden on students with a connection to the military so that they can acquire the skills and credentials that will enable them to thrive in careers of their choosing.
“My years of travel abroad opened my eyes to the conditions that limit opportunity,” said Houston, a Vietnam veteran. “As Americans, we share a sense of freedom and control over our own destinies, and my goal was to push aside financial obstacles so that Penn State students can seize their dreams and live up to their potential. I know that the Eberly College of Science provides a world-class education, so now we just need to make sure military families can access it.”
Houston’s early activation of his scholarship fund this year with additional giving has unlocked support for an inaugural awarding in 2022 of six separate $10,000 scholarships. Awards of this magnitude will be made each subsequent year in perpetuity.
Kailey Bray, a biology major on track to graduate in spring 2023, was among the first recipients. Her mother served in the U.S. Air Force as a security police officer, including a deployment to Prince Sultan Air Base, in Saudi Arabia. On her return to Joint Base Charleston, in South Carolina, while six months pregnant, she suffered injuries in an on-duty attack by a local civilian. Kailey’s father is also a military veteran. While on duty at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, in South Carolina, he sustained multiple spinal fractures and knee injuries, leading to a medical discharge.
“My parents have faced hardship with courage and resilience, and I try to live up to their example every day,” Bray said. “As I work toward my goal of becoming a physician assistant, this scholarship represents a powerful tribute to their service, and at the same time it also eases a significant financial burden on my family. I am so grateful for this act of generosity.”
A legacy of military service
Military service runs in Houston’s veins. His paternal grandfather, John Houston, saw combat in World War I, and his father, Robert Houston Sr., distinguished himself as an enlisted naval officer, first in World War II and later in the Korean War.
The itinerant life of wartime military service contrasted sharply with the maternal side of Bob’s family, whose lives were rooted in the soil. Houston’s maternal grandparents owned a 120-acre farming estate nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia, which his grandfather, Angus, oversaw and managed while he was director of the nearby West Virginia University 996-acre Reymann Memorial Research Farm. Growing up, Houston and his cousins would spend hours at a time removing rocks from the fields to prepare the farmland for plowing.
Houston’s decision to attend Penn State would end up braiding together the military and ecological traditions of his family. He secured a competitive ROTC scholarship and became a commissioned officer while majoring in zoology at the University Park campus. During his undergraduate years, he became a member of the Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity and Beta Beta Beta, the University’s chapter of the National Biological Honor Society. His graduation in 1969 coincided with the height of the Vietnam War.
“I was born in 1947, which made me part of the largest cohort in the baby-boom explosion,” Houston recalled. “I made some wonderful friends and developed my leadership skills at Penn State, but I’d decided I wasn’t going to seek a draft deferment for graduate school, so I signed up for ROTC to give me some control over which branch of the armed services I’d be channeled into.”
Houston entered officer training at Fort Lee, Virginia, and emerged at the top of his class. He chose to enter the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps — “I thought I’d manage an officer’s club or mess hall,” Houston said — but on account of his background in zoology, he was assigned to the memorial branch to be trained in mortuary services. After a four-month stint in the 2nd Infantry Brigade in Fort Benning, Georgia, he was redeployed to Da Nang, Vietnam.
“I was responsible for overseeing the identification and embalming of fallen service members from all branches of the service,” Houston said. “At first, it was difficult, but I came to realize that the grieving families back home were depending on us to do a good job. It had a dramatic influence on me, to bear witness to the fragility of life and the burden of service and sacrifice.”
Civilian life and giving back
After leaving the service, Houston spent several years on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh as he worked toward completing his doctoral degree in ecology, until he was lured away in 1974 to work as a full-time executive for the civil engineering design and consulting firm GAI Consultants. He rose to become vice president of environmental and energy services and a member of the board of directors. He spent decades traveling the U.S. and the world to evaluate the organizational effectiveness, engineering feasibility, regulatory compliance and environmental impact of various projects. In 2010, he burnished his credentials by completing the Harvard Leadership Development Program and the Harvard Executive Leadership Development Program.
“I’ve been very fortunate to see scores of countries around the world and to have been an eyewitness to history,” Houston said. “In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, I consulted for American utilities as formerly communist regimes raced to integrate private enterprise into their energy systems, and I also partnered with the World Bank to do assessments in India and China and then engineering projects in Iran and Nigeria.”
Houston’s recent gift adds to his record of service and philanthropy. He spent six years as an active volunteer in the Eberly College of Science Alumni Society. In 2018, he made a gift commitment of $100,000 to create the Robert J. Houston Transformative Experience Endowment and established a bequest to grow the fund to $250,000 on his passing, qualifying him to become a permanent member of the Atherton Society. The fund assists students with financial need in the Eberly College of Science who participate in a study-abroad experience. Beyond his service to Penn State, Houston also served on the board of the Carnegie Institute and as board member and president of the Pittsburgh Post of the Society of American Military Engineers, earning the distinction of National Fellow.
With the record-breaking success of “A Greater Penn State for 21st Century Excellence,” which raised $2.2 billion from 2016 to 2022, philanthropy is helping to sustain the University’s tradition of education, research and service to communities across the commonwealth and around the globe. Scholarships enable our institution to open doors and welcome students from every background; support for transformative experiences allows our students and faculty to fulfill their vast potential for leadership; and gifts toward discovery and excellence help us to serve and impact the world we share. To learn more about the impact of giving and the continuing need for support, visit raise.psu.edu.