In the late 1920s, Kathryn Wasserman, a newly minted graduate of Wellesley College, brushed aside her father’s worries and began an anthropological adventure by horseback through the mountainous Caucasus region of Eurasia. She often survived on a meager diet of berries and goat meat, but she brought back to the United States a hearty helping of knowledge about an area and country—the young Soviet Union—that most westerners knew little about. She also brought back a commitment to increasing international understanding that has endured throughout her lifetime.

As she turns 100 years old this year, Kathryn Wasserman Davis, the widow of Shelby Cullom Davis ’30, remains true to that commitment, as evidenced by a $5 million gift she and her son, Trustee Shelby M. C. Davis ’58, gave to create an endowment for Princeton’s International Center. The center will now be called the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 International Center.

“We are grateful to Kathryn Davis and her son, Shelby, for this very generous gift, which reflects her own engagement with the world and her strong support for global learning,” said President Tilghman. “The International Center is now in a better position than ever before to strengthen the multicultural character of our University community and to help the students and scholars who come to Princeton from around the world to thrive here.”

The center works to familiarize scholars with America—and to teach Americans more about the rest of the world. “The International Center is dedicated to fostering dialogue at a time when misunderstandings between nations and cultures could pose a serious threat,” Davis says. “I know my husband, who was passionate about encouraging crosscultural exchange, would be as thrilled about this gift as I am.”

The center offers an array of programs to help Princetonians from more than 100 nations feel at home—ranging from English language tutoring and weekly luncheons with faculty members to introductions to “host families.” The center also sponsors events to introduce the community to the many cultures represented by Princeton’s 1,700 international students and scholars. Among them are an annual International Festival in April, lunchtime discussions of such subjects as the role of women in different cultures, and video programs in which students and faculty members discuss international issues.

An ambition to learn and teach about life beyond U.S. borders has driven Davis for most of her life. The daughter of a businessman and a suffragist (she recalls waving a flag as a four-year-old in a voting rights parade with her mother), she earned a master’s degree from Columbia University and a PhD in political science from the University of Geneva at a time when few women pursued higher education. She married a fellow student, who went on to become a renowned Wall Street investor and, later, U.S. ambassador to Switzerland.

Kathryn Davis has worked for the Council on Foreign Relations and is the author of The Soviets at Geneva: The USSR and the League of Nations, 1919-1933. She has traveled widely, including more than 30 visits back to Russia, and the years have not diminished her energy. She took up oil painting in her late 90s.

In 2006 she received the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service from the Washington, D.C.-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The brief talk she gave to the group on the occasion summed up her lifetime effort to build bridges between nations. “We all need to talk more,” she said. “Not to our friends, but to our enemies. And I think that through talking, and not fighting, we might come to some agreement—or agree to disagree and get along anyway.”