A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
STARS College Network
Byron and Tina Trott pledged $150 million to double the nonprofit’s consortium of colleges and universities that are home to programs aimed at assisting students from small-town and rural America enrolling in and graduating from the undergraduate program of their choice. The expansion from 16 institutions to 32 will include flagship state schools, historically Black colleges, Ivy League universities, and other institutions. STARS stands for Small Town And Rural Students. The money will be paid out over 10 years and come through the couple’s Trott Family Philanthropies.
Byron Trott is chairman and co-CEO of BDT & MSD Partners, a merchant bank and investment firm that caters to ultra-wealthy business owners and their families. He previously served as vice chairman of investment banking at Goldman Sachs and headed up that firm’s Chicago office. Trott grew up in small-town Union, Mo., and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree and an MBA at the University of Chicago in 1981 and 1982, respectively. The Trott’s launched the nonprofit consortium last year with a $20 million donation.
William & Mary
Jane Batten pledged $100 million to establish and endow the Batten School of Coastal and Marine Sciences, and back the creation of a bachelor’s degree in coastal and marine sciences. The new school will expand the William & Mary Virginia Institute of Marine Science’s work. The institute conducts marine science research and advises and provides information to state and federal governments, businesses, and the public. University officials said in a news release that they plan to raise an additional $100 million for the school.
Batten is a longtime donor to nonprofits in Virginia, where the college is located. She leads the Batten Foundation, the family’s grant maker, and is the widow of Frank Batten, who founded the Weather Channel in 1982 and was chairman of Landmark Communications, which included daily newspapers and specialty publications. He died in 2009. The Battens have given hundreds of millions to higher education and environmental conservation nonprofits. They landed on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the top American donors four times.
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law
James (Jim) Kohlberg pledged $30 million to launch the Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court, and to support long-term research, public education programs, and advocacy efforts to change how the Supreme Court operates. One aim of the center is to push for term limits for the court’s justices, who once appointed to the court can serve until they die or decide to retire.
Kohlberg co-founded the private equity firm Kohlberg & Company in 1987 and has served as its chairman since 2007. He also oversees a personal portfolio of venture capital investments in media, technology, and film production. His late father, Jerome Kohlberg, was one of the founders of the private equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, now called KKR, and left the firm to start Kohlberg & Company with his son. Jerome Kohlberg died in 2015 at 89.
The Brennan Center, a law and policy institute connected to New York University’s law school, was founded in 1995 and named after Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who served on the Supreme Court from 1956 to 1990.
California Institute of Technology
Mary Zi-ping Luo and Jack Yongfeng Zhang gave $30 million to endow and name the Rudolph A. Marcus Center for Theoretical Chemistry and to support graduate and post doctoral fellowships, and establish three funds within the the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering: one for computing, one for recruiting, and one for discretionary use. Marcus, a Nobel Laureate and the John G. Kirkwood and Arthur A. Noyes Professor of Chemistry at Cal Tech, and a longtime mentor and friend of the couple.
Luo and Zhang are scientists who founded Amphastar Pharmaceuticals, a specialty drug company in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., that manufactures inhalation and intranasal products, such as naloxone, a drug used to treat opioid overdoses.
Originally from China, Luo is Amphastar’s COO and chief scientist. She came to the United States in 1980 for graduate studies. She earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Princeton in 1985 and then joined Cal Tech as a postdoctoral fellow from 1986 to 1988, the year she became a U.S. citizen. She is the author of A Generation Lost, a memoir that tells of her family’s hardships during China’s Cultural Revolution. Her parents, intellectuals who were considered anti-revolutionary by China’s communist party, were imprisoned and did not survive.
Zhang, also from China, came to the United States in 1984 to attend graduate school at State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1987. He then went to Cal Tech where he was one of Marcus’s postdoctoral fellows from 1988 to 1990. He serves as Amphastar’s CEO and its chief scientific officer.
University of Oklahoma
Brian and Kim Kimrey pledged $20 million to support the university’s baseball and football programs. Each program will receive $10 million of the total. The money will pay for renovations to the university’s baseball stadium, Dale Mitchell Park, and support further renovations of the Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, where the university’s football team plays its home games.
Brian Kimrey is president of the Ops Sales Company, a structural steel manufacturer and retailer in Dewey, Okla. With their latest donation, the couple have given a total of $25.1 million to the university’s athletics programs, including $2 million in 2022 and $1.1 million in 2020 for upgrades to Dale Mitchell Park.
UC Berkeley Extension and UCLA Extension
Digital marketing expert Scott Galloway gave $12 million to establish UC Excelerator, a program that gives non-traditional students, primarily community college graduates and those with limited college experience, career-focused coursework, networking opportunities, and access to industry leaders, all free of cost. The money will be split equally between the University of California at Berkeley’s and the University of California at Los Angeles’s continuing education divisions, with each getting $6 million apiece.
Fall 2024 UC Excelerator offerings at UCLA will focus on business and entrepreneurship, while UC Berkeley’s program will concentrate on data analytics, facilities management, and project management.
Galloway is a marketing professor at New York University Stern School of Business, where he teaches brand strategy and digital marketing to MBA students. He founded several companies, including L2, a business intelligence firm; the e-commerce company Red Envelope; and Prophet, a marketing strategy consultancy. He also founded Digital IQ Index, an international ranking of prestige brands’ digital competence. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from UCLA in 1987 and a master’s in business administration from UC Berkeley in 1992.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
