A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Texas Woman’s University
Dallas area businesswoman Merrilee Kick gave $30 million to establish an entrepreneurship institute, an endowed chair, and an entrepreneur-in-residence program in the College of Business, each of which will bear Kick’s name. A portion of the donation will also help to pay for the construction of the business school’s new home. The business school will be named for the donor.
Kick founded BuzzBallz/Southern Champion, a Dallas company that manufactures pre-mixed and ready-to-drink cocktails that come in spherically-shaped plastic containers. A high school teacher in Plano, Texas, at the time, Kick was sitting by the pool grading student’s papers when, hankering for a cocktail, she dreamed up the idea for the company. She soon enrolled in the university’s business school and went on to earn an MBA there in 2009.
Her master’s degree thesis was the basis for the business plan that led to the creation of her company. The spirits company Sazerac acquired BuzzBallz in April for an undisclosed sum, although some news outlets reported the deal was completed for an estimated $500 million. Despite the acquisition, Kick continues to serve as BuzzBallz’s CEO.
Tulane University
Myrna Daniels gave $17.2 million to support geriatric medicine and research. Of the total, $9.2 million will be used to establish the Myrna L. Daniels Geriatric Medicine Endowed Fund to support research and education in geriatrics and aging-related medical conditions; $5 million will go toward construction projects at the School of Medicine, including new laboratories and research space. The remaining $3 million will establish the Myrna L. Daniels Chair in Geriatric Medicine.
Daniels is a retired speech pathologist who earned a bachelor’s degree from Tulane’s Newcomb College in 1952. Her late husband, John Daniels, was an architect and real estate developer who founded the Canadian real estate company, the Daniels Corporation.
Three generations of Myrna Daniels’s family are Tulane alumni, including two of her grandchildren and her son Paul Finger, an ophthalmologist and eye cancer specialist who serves as director of ocular tumor services at the Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital.
Pennsylvania State University
Patrick Hewitt and Jennifer Wilson Hewitt pledged nearly $3 million to establish and endow three funds: the Wilson Hewitt Excellence in Trial Advocacy Program at Penn State Dickinson Law; the Wilson Hewitt Professorship in Biology in the Eberly College of Science; and the Wilson Hewitt First-Year Experience Endowment in the Schreyer Honors College.
The donation will be divided evenly across the three funds with each fund receiving $1 million. While the university will not receive the $3 million until the donors’ deaths, the Hewitts plan to give an additional $268,750 (roughly $90,000 apiece) over the next five years to help get the three funds up and running sooner.
The couple are lawyers and Penn State Dickinson Law alumni. Jennifer Wilson Hewitt earned her law degree in 1985, and went on to work as a litigation attorney for Doepken Keevican & Weiss, a law firm in Pittsburgh.
After earning his law degree in 1983, Patrick Hewitt served as a U.S. Army JAG Corps member before co-founding Riley, Hewitt, Witte & Romano, P.C., which provides legal expertise to corporations and manufacturers in business litigation and contract and business tort litigation.
The Hewitts’ child, Michael, is also a Penn State alumnus. They studied marine biology and became a Schreyer Honors Scholar in the Eberly College of Science. Michael graduated in 2023 and conducts research for a shellfish hatchery.
University of California at Los Angeles
Irv and Xiaoyan Zhao Drasnin pledged $2.3 million to support an effort to digitize and index a large collection of rare visual and audio media materials. The collection, now named the UCLA Irv Drasnin and Xiaoyan Zhao Drasnin Communication Archive, comprises analog recordings of television and public affairs news programming, including raw footage, scripts, edits, satellite feeds, and vintage television commercials, all of which were recorded over decades by the late UCLA professor Paul Rosenthal and his colleagues.
The digitization project will be completed over the next three years and the archive will then be made available to researchers and the public. In addition to the television news collection, the archive includes recordings of hundreds of notable speakers who visited UCLA dating back as early as the 1950s, including the civil rights giant Martin Luther King Jr., J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who oversaw the development of the first nuclear weapons, and the celebrated film actress and screenwriter Mae West.
A UCLA alumnus, Irv Drasnin earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1956 and started his career as a newspaper reporter. He went on to write, direct, and produce news programs at CBS News, including the CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite and Frontline, The American Experience, and Nova for PBS.
Xiaoyan Zhao Drasnin is a writer who served as senior vice president and global director of research and consulting at GfK Roper Public Affairs, where she conducted global research for public diplomacy projects for the U.S. State Department and the government of Qatar , values and trends research for international companies, and reputation monitoring for government institutions.
Lambda Legal
Perry McKay gave $1 million to establish a program that will recruit lawyers who will provide pro bono counsel on litigation aimed at protecting the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV. McKay’s gift will also support the new program’s senior counsel and pro bono director post.
The program, the Perry McKay Pro Bono Clearinghouse, will help the nonprofit group increase pro bono hours by at least 52 percent by the end of 2026. McKay is a Chicago investor in mineral mines.
University of Maryland
Albert Carey gave $1 million back the Maryland Promise Program, which provides scholarships for undergraduates from underserved populations from Maryland and Washington, D.C. Specifically, the money will be used to increase the number of the program’s students enrolled in the Robert H. Smith School of Business, and support a second cohort in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Carey is executive chairman of Unifi, a global textile solutions provider. He retired in 2019 as CEO of PepsiCo North America, where he worked for nearly four decades. He started his career at Procter & Gamble and then joined PepsiCo in 1981.
He knows the value of a university scholarship. He came to the University of Maryland on an athletics scholarship and earned a bachelor’s degree in urban studies there in 1974. He is a longtime donor to his alma mater. He gave $1 million in 2019 to support the Maryland Promise Program, and has previously given gifts to support the athletics department, the Robert H. Smith School of Business, the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, and the College of Education. Carey currently serves as chairman of the University of Maryland College Park Foundation’s Board of Trustees.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
