A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
University of Florida Levin College of Law
Fredric Levin left $40 million to support students, faculty, and career-readiness efforts. The bequest will also be used to expand academic and law-clinic programs. Levin earned a law degree in 1961 from the law school that today bears his name.
Levin was chairman of Levin Papantonio Rafferty, a law firm in Pensacola, Fla., that specializes in personal-injury cases. He was a well-known and sometimes controversial trial lawyer who played an important role in some of the state cases brought against tobacco companies in the 1990s. The law school was named for him when he gave a $10 million gift in 1999. Levin died in January at age 83.
University of Notre Dame School of Architecture
Fritz and Mary Duda gave $30 million through their Fritz and Mary Lee Duda Family Foundation to establish a center dedicated to historic preservation in the field of architecture. The center will be named the Michael Christopher Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability. Michael Duda is the donors’ late son.
The gift will also be used to expand the architecture school’s curriculum in urbanism and traditional architecture and urbanism, sponsor conferences, provide financial assistance to graduate students working in the field, and support the hiring of new faculty.
Fritz Duda founded and leads the Fritz Duda Company, a real-estate investment and development firm in Dallas. He served on Notre Dame’s School of Architecture Advisory Council for seven years before he was elected to the university’s Board of Trustees in 1997.
Michael Duda graduated from Notre Dame in 2005 and practiced architecture in California before joining his family’s real-estate company. In 2018 he founded his own real-estate firm, the Briar Cove Development Company. He died in 2019 at age 38.
Pennsylvania State University
Peter and Ann Tombros pledged $26 million to establish the Peter and Ann Cullen Tombros Endowment, a fund the university’s president can use to provide seed grants for pilot programs and to match donations from other donors. Some of the gift will also be used to endow a dean’s chair, a basketball coach position, and programs in medicine, theater, and architecture.
Peter Tombros is a former CEO of Enzon, a biotechnology company in Plantation, Fla., and spent 25 years working for the pharmaceuticals giant, Pfizer. He earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the university and served as an executive-in-residence at the the university’s Eberly College of Science. Ann Tombros taught in public and private elementary schools before establishing her a property-management and design consulting firm.
University of Michigan College of Engineering
Larry Leinweber and his wife, Claudia Babiarz, gave $25 million through their Leinweber Foundation to help pay for a new building that will be named the Leinweber Computer Science and Information Building. The donation will enable the university to bring the College of Engineering’s computer-science and engineering division and the School of Information together under one roof.
Leinweber founded New World Systems Corporation, a Troy, Mich., company that provides software for 911 dispatch centers, law enforcement, fire departments, and paramedics. Babiarz served as corporate counsel at New World Systems for more than 27 years.
Mary Baldwin University
Paula Stephens Lambert gave $12.5 million, most of which is unrestricted. A portion of the donation will be used to endow a study-abroad scholarship Lambert established in 2015. Lambert founded an artisanal cheese manufacturer, the Mozzarella Company, in Dallas in 1982.
Lambert studied at the university for two years in the early 1960s before returning to her home state to finish her degree at the University of Texas. She said in a news release that the faculty at Mary Baldwin instilled in her a love of culture and language that inspired her to move to Perugia, Italy, after she graduated to study Italian language and art history. Her experience with the Umbrian food culture there inspired her to start her company.
Humane Society of Silicon Valley
Michelle Oates Detkin and her husband, Peter Detkin, pledged $10 million to expand access to veterinary care for financially struggling families in the Silicon Valley area. The charity’s Animal Community Center will be renamed for the Detkins.
The charity plans to use the money to create a mobile veterinary clinic called the Wellness Waggin’ so the organization can provide low-cost and free veterinary care for the pets of financially strapped families. Charity officials said in a news release that they plan to seek additional funding to maintain this program for decades to come.
Michelle Oates Detkin is a retired attorney. She worked in real-estate law and in commercial law at Intel, a technology giant in Santa Clara, Calif. Peter Detkin is a managing director at Sherpa Technology Group, a consultancy in San Mateo, Calif. He co-founded Intellectual Ventures, a company that buys patents, pulls them together in huge portfolios, and then licenses them to third-party companies, a controversial practice that is referred to as “patent trolling.” Previously, he served as assistant general counsel at Intel.
Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Foundation
Brian and Martha Cornell gave $10 million to build a behavioral-health facility at the Sarasota Memorial Hospital, which will be named the Cornell Family Behavioral Health Pavilion.
The new center will replace the medical center’s aging 1970s-era behavioral-health hospital with a modern facility that expands and centralizes care for people struggling with mental- and behavioral-health challenges.
Brian Cornell is chairman and CEO of retail giant Target Corporation, headquartered in Minneapolis. Prior to joining the company in 2014, Cornell served as CEO of the crafts store Michaels and led Sam’s Club and PepsiCo Americas Foods.
Texas Christian University
Paul Andrews Jr. left $10 million to endow scholarships within TCU’s Andrews Institute of Mathematics & Science Education and to support doctoral candidates and research faculty within the institute.
Andrews founded and led TTI, a distributor of electronic components that he sold to Berkshire Hathaway in 2007 for an undisclosed sum. Andrews continued to lead the company until his death in March at age 78. He worked for various electronics companies, including General Dynamics, before starting Tex-Tronics in 1971. The company later became TTI.
Detroit Institute of Arts
Joan and Wayne Webber gave $5 million through their Wayne and Joan Webber Foundation to support the work done in the DIA Art Studio, an experimental lab where artists lead courses for people of all ages and abilities throughout the year.
Wayne Webber, who died shortly after the couple gave this gift, founded W.W. Webber, a highway construction company in Houston. With this latest gift, the Webbers have given the museum a total of nearly $10 million since 2008.
Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business
Kyle and Katy Miller pledged $5 million to build an outdoor courtyard, which will be named for them. Kyle Miller earned a bachelor’s degree in finance from the university in 2001. His father, David, also graduated from the university.
Kyle Miller founded and leads Silver Hill Energy Partners and Silver Hill Partners, LP, oil and gas investment and operating companies that are headquartered in Dallas. He previously served as a senior vice president of Energy Trust Partners, a Dallas private-equity firm focused on the energy sector.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
