Scholarship donor, recipient connect over shared experiences

Janie Dulaney, BSJ ’19, was awarded the first Long Family Communication Scholarship this academic year, helping her financially and connecting her to a fellow Bobcat with whom she’s already had many shared experiences.

A first-generation college graduate, Robert Long, BSC ’72, knew the value of higher education long before he ever heard of Ohio University.

Neither of Long’s parents were able to attend to college. His great-grandfather passed away when his father, Dale, was a teenager, requiring the young man to work his way through high school to support his family. Nonetheless, both Dale and his wife, Faith, instilled in their children the value of an education and helped support their grandchildren while they were pursuing their college degrees.

After graduating from the Scripps College of Communication’s radio and television program and making OHIO history as the first news and sports director of the All Campus Radio Network (ACRN), Long embarked on a more than 30-year career in public media and higher education. He worked in commercial radio news and later public radio, helping to train aspiring journalists at Kent State University’s WKSU and Miami University’s WMUB.

Robert Long, BSC ’72, created the Long Family Communication Scholarship in honor of his parents, Dale and Faith Long, and with a goal of helping to ease the burden of student loan debt.

“That was the greatest work experience of my life because I was training young journalists, and they were working in the newsroom side by side with professionals and grad students,” Long said.

His experience working with students combined with those values instilled by his parents ignited in Long another passion—helping to ease the burden of student loan debt facing many young scholars today.

“There are so many young people who face the prospect of having lots of college loan debt to pay back,” Long said. “I wanted to do whatever small part I could to help at least one person in grappling with that issue.”

In 2017, Long established the Long Family Communication Scholarship in memory of his parents. An endowed scholarship, the Long Family Communication Scholarship, once fully vested, will create a permanent fund to benefit rising juniors and seniors enrolled in the Scripps College who demonstrate financial need.

Wanting to start assisting students as soon as possible, Long donated extra money so that the scholarship could be awarded years before the endowment would be fully vested. Janie Dulaney, BSJ ’19, was awarded the first Long Family Communication Scholarship this academic year.

“I’m so thankful for this opportunity,” said Dulaney, who is majoring in strategic communication.

Receiving the scholarship not only helped Dulaney financially but also connected her to a fellow Bobcat with whom she’s already had many shared experiences.

Over the past several months, Long and Dulaney have spoken by phone and email and discovered a number of things they have in common. They’re both from Northeast Ohio and started their academic journeys at OHIO eager to study sports journalism. Dulaney’s father passed away when she was 9, so she can relate to Long’s father’s upbringing and the challenges a family faces when losing a parent. And Long’s mother was an avid Cleveland Indians fan, as is Dulaney.

“I told (Janie) that both of my parents would have really liked her for different reasons. My dad would like that I can tell she’s a very hard worker and that she takes school very seriously. And she also loves baseball, and my mother was a huge baseball fan,” Long said. “She would have fit in perfectly with my family.”

For Dulaney, being able to talk to and get to know a successful OHIO alumnus has been inspiring.

“For some like him who is really accomplished … the fact that he chose to come here and make a difference at his alma mater is just super cool,” Dulaney said. “He’s not only giving scholarships to students, but he’s really trying to make a difference on the campus where he went.”

“I told my family that I couldn’t have handpicked a better first recipient of the scholarship than Janie,” Long said.