For the love of faith and community: Maryville College alums Bill ’72 and Jan Welton Postler ’72 gift their alma mater $500,000 for new endowment
Oct. 23, 2025
Fifty-three years ago, shortly after receiving his Maryville College diploma, the Rev. Bill Postler ’72 braced himself for a tedious afternoon.
He had completed his Maryville College career, distinguishing himself in the classroom and on the basketball court, and he had met the girl of his dreams — Jan Welton Postler ’72, whom he would later marry and spend the rest of his life with. Graduate school at Vanderbilt University awaited, and after a Master of Divinity, a career in the clergy, and he was anxious to get started.
Then-President Dr. Joseph Copeland, however, had one final request for the young man. In those days, commencement coincided with class reunion celebrations now observed during Homecoming, and on the day Postler was handed his degree, the Class of 1922 was in the audience, gathered for its 50th anniversary. And as the president of the Class of 1972, he was asked by Copeland to spend the afternoon talking to them.
“I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t going to be much fun, meeting with all these old folks,’” Postler said during a return to his Alma Mater for Homecoming 2025. “But then they started telling stories of sneaking kegs of beer and girls into Memorial Hall (the men’s dorm originally constructed in 1871 and torn down in 1975), which was where I lived. And then they started talking about all of their pranks and escapades, and I thought our class had invented all of those things.
“And then they started talking about their memories of teachers and coaches, and the impact those people had on their lives, and I thought to myself, ‘Gosh, I wonder if I’m going to feel that way 50 years from now?’ And the reality is that I do. I look back at the impact some of the faculty and the coaches had on me, and I realize that all of those people were more than just teachers — they were colleagues and mentors, and I think back now, and I feel exactly as that Class of 1922 felt.”
Gratitude begets generosity
With Jan in complete agreement, the Postlers have been inspired by their Maryville College experiences to give $500,000 to the College to create the Bill and Jan Welton Postler Isaac Anderson Fellows Endowment, which will provide tuition dollars to student leaders who want to explore their goals of work and calling in light of their Christian faith. The couple was recognized at the President’s Welcome Reception for Homecoming 2025 on Friday, Oct. 10, and again at the Founder’s Day Showcase held immediately afterward in the Ronald and Lynda Nutt Theatre of the Clayton Center for the Arts.
While it’s certainly the largest gift they’ve made to Maryville College, it’s by no means the first, according to Jan.
“We started donating at the very beginning, two years after we graduated,” she said. “We wanted to make an annual donation, and in those days, $25 seemed like a lot of money. But we’ve never drifted from Maryville College, really. It’s always been an important part of our life, given the fact that we met here, and that we ended up together, and now we share the same memories and stories and friends.”
And while there’s a whole lot of miles between where they live now (Durango, Colorado) and the College they still call home, those memories have always sustained them. After graduation, Bill — a Mathematics and Philosophy/Religion major — applied to Vanderbilt University, where he pursued his graduate studies.
“We were very fortunate to have extremely top-notch faculty in religion and philosophy when I was here, because while Vanderbilt attracts the top people, I had better preparation than almost anybody in my class,” he said.
Jan, an English major, followed her mother, Elizabeth Welton, to MC, who in turn followed Copeland to Maryville College. After he accepted the presidency and stepped down as the pastor of Second Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, he asked Elizabeth to serve as his secretary, and as a result, Jan opted to attend MC instead of the University of Tennessee, like her siblings.
The couple married at Second Presbyterian in 1974; by that point, Jan had worked at the Maryville College Environmental Education Center at Tremont and had moved to Nashville to be with her husband, working at the Cumberland Museum and Science Center until he finished his master’s in 1975. After his ordination in the Presbyterian Church, the pair headed west, where he served as a pastor in Bozeman, Montana; Great Falls, Montana; and Durango. Jan, on the other hand, served as the registrar at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, the Charles M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, and the Animas Museum in Durango.
Their life was blessed, and roughly two decades ago, they began to talk about how to share some of those blessings with their alma mater.
A nod to faith and providence
“We talked about endowing a scholarship and had some discussions with Diana (Canacaris ’02, director of major gifts at the MC Office of Advancement) about what that might look like, and she made some suggestions,” Bill said. “When she came back to us with the Isaac Anderson Fellowship, we liked the idea of honoring the origins of the College, and honoring the faith relationship that was implicit in the origins of the College,” Bill said. “That was such a big part of our experience, so we decided to focus on that. Then, as we’ve gotten older, we began to look at our finances, all of these different funds here and there, and decided to simplify things.
“One fund I decided we could downsize and get rid of was about a half-million dollars, and so when we decided to liquidate it, on the day of the transfer, it came down to $500,000 exactly — not a penny more or less, so we feel good about making that now.”
And giving it to one of the College’s church-related scholarships feels even more serendipitous, given Bill’s long background as a Presbyterian minister, and the ways in which their faith made their Maryville College experiences even richer. According to the Rev. Jessica Kitchens Lewis ’07, who serves as MC chaplain and the director of the Samuel Tyndale Wilson Center for Campus Ministry (CCM), the current Isaac Anderson Fellows — two from each class — “help lead chapel, help decide who we will invite to speak in Chapel, participate in other programs and engage in other opportunities on campus and in the community.”
“These students do not have to aim to work in professional ministry, but we do find that some go on to do so — like the Rev. Paul Earheart-Brown ’15 (the College’s associate chaplain and director of the Maryville Adventures in Studying Theology, or MAST, program),” Lewis said. “Our discussions look at how their faith is lived out in the ways they lead and in whatever path they take, because it is an important part of their foundation.”
While the Postlers visited the College for Homecoming, they were able to join the 2025-26 fellows and CCM leadership for lunch, and the students, Lewis said, “loved getting to meet with them over a table and sharing stories, and we are honored to have their support and be inspired by their lives and work.”
In that breaking of bread, the Postler saw themselves, all those decades ago, and found further confirmation that their gift is a worthy one.
“I just hope they feel that support that we did, that they grow those values — whether they have them already or not – and that they further their faith journeys, their careers, their lifestyles and their futures,” Jan said.
And ideally, Bill said, those who benefit from their generous gift will come away with the same sense of wonder and long-time devotion for MC that the Postlers feel.
“At that time, the faculty helped me to recognize that one could be a thoughtful person and a faithful person at the same time, that one could ask the difficult questions about faith,” he said. “Coming out of a science and math background as I did, that was important to me, understanding that faith was not turning a blind eye to the challenging questions of life, and that faith was a way of negotiating those challenges and difficulties.”
Coming to such realizations, he pointed out, is at the heart of what Maryville College has always done. Sometimes it just takes a little time and perspective to see that … and to remember all of the mischief and tomfoolery as well, of course.
“I hope that in 50 years,” he added with a grin, remembering the “old folks” on his graduation day and the one who now stares back at him in the mirror, “they’re talking about the same things we’re talking about today!”
