The Merrill B. Frick Family Endowment for Protestant Studies was established in 1998, by Merrill and Louise Frick of Wawaka, Indiana. Merrill serves as president of Frick Services, Inc., a provider of wholesale and retail farm supplies and grain storage. The Fricks, longtime members of the Rockne Heritage Fund Director’s Circle, have three children: Gretchen, Janell, and Dan. Four of their grandchildren have graduated from the University: Adam (’01), Emily (’04), Amanda (’08), and Daniel (’10).

The Frick Endowment provides critical support for humanities scholarship and research. Significant resources have been purchased, allowing for development of collections on the various Reformed traditions within Christianity. New acquisitions include biography (Herman Selderhuis’s John Calvin: A Pilgrim’s Life); church history (Elizabeth A. Clark’s Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America); and theology (The future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright by John Piper). Additionally, the collection includes a database, the Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts, which brings together a broad ranges of Christian texts form the Reformation and post-Reformation eras.

The Frick family has two other endowments focusing on German and early Christian studies.