Frederik Meijer Chair

Maintaining Calvin’s legacy

The purpose of the Frederik Meijer Chair is to engage in scholarship and teaching about Dutch culture. The term “Dutch” refers primarily to the Kingdom of the Netherlands; Dutch-American immigrant culture is only peripherally related to the purview of the chair. The term “culture” is broad in scope with relevance to fields such as history, geography, art history, literature, and theology. The activities of the chair will naturally interact with the university’s Dutch language and culture program and thereby enhance familiarization with the languages of the Netherlands-primarily Dutch, but possibly Frisian as well as Dutch dialects. In communicating a better understanding of the culture of the Netherlands, the chair shall also involve the larger university community, its supporting constituency, and the public at large.

Our country of origin

Calvin University grew from a distinctly European ethnic root, that of a Dutch Christian Reformed community that settled in the Midwest in the last half of the 19th century. Calvin has tended that immigrant root through scholarly and cultural immersion into the Dutch-American subculture in which the university thrives. Less attention has been focused, however, on the still-flourishing culture of Calvin’s “country of origin.” In a time when the university’s interests reach into a myriad of nations and cultures, it has become essential to take a good, critical look at the Netherlands, the country of ancestry of the majority of Calvin students and alumni.

The Frederik Meijer Chair and beyond

Through the Frederik Meijer Chair in Dutch Language and Culture, Calvin University will embark on a thorough and scholarly exploration of the Netherlands, a country eminently worthy of that attention. Not only was Holland a cosmopolitan hub of art and a maritime power in the 17th century, the Netherlands of today is a model of social and economic stability. The Dutch are a continual innovative and impressive force on the world scene in the realms of art, technology, water and land engineering and social policy.

Through lectures, performances, workshops, seminars and art exhibitions, the Frederik Meijer Chair in Dutch Language and Culture will bring the culture of the Netherlands to the community and university that have grown from that culture and to the community beyond.

The current Chair is Herm De Vries. The previous Chair was Henk Aay.

About Frederik Meijer

In 2006, Fred Meijer provided a major gift to Calvin to establish the Frederik Meijer Chair in Dutch Language and Culture. The first holder of the Chair was Professor Henk Aay, who was born in the Netherlands and immigrated to Canada with his parents at age 13. The current chair is Professor Herman De Vries. Through the Chair, Calvin University will embark on a thorough and scholarly exploration of the Netherlands, a country which today is seen as a model of social and economic stability. The Dutch are an innovative and impressive force in the realms of art, technology, water and land engineering and social policy. Through this gift, Frederik Meijer becomes a major contributor to the field of Netherlandic studies.

Fred began working in his father’s small Greenville, Michigan grocery store when he was 14, and he has been a major force behind the expansion of that humble enterprise into Meijer, Inc., whose 176 stores are now based in five states. Fred and his wife Lena, who once worked as a cashier in the original Greenville store, have been generous benefactors to the community of Grand Rapids, founding both the Fred and Lena Meijer Heart Center and the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. An avid student of Dutch History, and a regular visitor to the Netherlands—his father’s birthplace—Fred hopes that the Frederik Meijer Chair in Dutch Language and Culture will provide a thorough and fair-minded exploration of the country he loves: “The Netherlands people are a mixture of many things,” he said. “I would hope this chair brings a pure history of the Netherlands and its people with all the warts and all the variations.

About Henk Aay

The first holder of the Frederik Meijer Chair in Dutch Language and Culture, Henk Aay has long had a scholarly interest in his native country. Born in the Netherlands in 1945, Aay settled with his family in Canada, graduating with a BA in geography and planning from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. He earned a PhD in geography from Clark University in Worcester, MA, and came to Calvin in 1982 as the university’s first full-time Ph.D. geographer.

Aay has long studied the Netherlands, published on the geography of the country, served as a visiting scholar at the Free University of Amsterdam and University of Groningen and led more than ten Calvin off-campus interim courses there.