ROUND ROCK — A Georgetown resident who has never set foot on the University of Texas campus has given $1 million to the school for a new professorship to focus on a growing segment of the U.S. population that holds no religious views.
The endowment is coming from Brian Bolton, 80, who is retired after a 35-year career in academia. He was an assistant professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology from 1968 to 1971. From 1971 to 2002, Bolton was a professor of rehabilitation and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas.
Bolton said he has never visited UT but shares common values with the educational institution. “My 35-year career was dedicated to scholarship and research in academia,” he said. “I know UT is a great university, and that’s all I need to know.”
Bolton said he wanted to donate the money to make a lasting impact.
UT will be the first public university to have an endowed chair for secular studies, said professor Phil Zuckerman, an assistant dean at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., where the first secular studies program in the nation was created.
“For me, this is a dream come true,” Zuckerman said. “As more and more people are leaving religion, we need to understand who they are and how they live their lives and why they are doing it.”
UT will not be hiring a new professor for Bolton‘s endowment but will choose one who is already on the faculty, said Justin Michalka, the executive director of development for the College of Liberal Arts. The university has not yet chosen who that will be, he said.
Michalka declined to comment further on Bolton‘s donation.
“During the past two decades there has been significant increase in the U.S. among those who associate with a secular worldview, a trend particularly pronounced in younger people, prompting increased research in this emerging field,” according to a university news release on Bolton‘s endowment.
Twenty-six percent of Americans described themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” in a Pew Research Center study in 2018-2019, according to the center’s website.
Since he retired in Texas in 2002 to be near relatives, Bolton has written dozens of articles for secular magazines, he said. He calls himself a “nonbeliever.”
“I’ve been a critic of the Bible and fundamentalist religion for at least 40 years,” he said.
Born into a family of 10 children, Bolton went to Sunday school at a Presbyterian church in Kansas from ages 4 to 8 but never developed any faith, he said.
“I‘m not anti-religious. I am just not religious,” Bolton said. “I have good friends who are Catholics and fundamentalists and Jews, and I like them very much, but I don’t like some of their views.”
Bolton said he was able to afford the $1 million gift to UT by saving money and being frugal. “I never lived high on the hog,” he said.
During his academic career, Bolton wrote 10 books and won 12 research awards from the American Rehabilitation Counseling Association. He said he has conducted marriages and funerals as a humanist minister.
“In the most basic terms, humanism is a focus on life and the here and now,” said Bolton. “We reject all claims of an afterlife.”
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