Gifts From MacKenzie Scott Put Overlooked Colleges and Universities in the Spotlight

MacKenzie Scott gave one of her largest publicized gifts — $50 million — to Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black state university in Texas.

It’s an institution for which a gift of $1 million would be considered “a really big deal,” says Ruth Simmons, president of Prairie View. She says it’s hard to overestimate what Scott’s gift means to students who, together with their families, have struggled with illness and job loss because of Covid and face the fear and trauma of police violence.

“Imagine that you have an alum who is Sandra Bland who was stopped just outside the gates of the campus, who was hauled off to jail for a minor infraction and died in jail. Imagine that you have another alum, Robbie Tolan, who has a baseball career. He’s in his parents’ driveway in his own car and the police mistake him for a car thief, and they shoot him in the driveway of his parents’ house,” Simmons says. “All of that is what our students are dealing with every day, and suddenly somebody says to them, ‘You’re worth something, and I want to invest in you.’”

Scott showered $5.7 billion on nonprofits last year, and she made a point to devote significant sums to often overlooked colleges and universities that serve students of color and those from low-income backgrounds. She gave to six tribal colleges, an array of small community colleges, and at least 20 historically Black colleges and universities. While Scott directed several of her eight-figure donations to some of the most selective HBCUs in the country, such as Howard University and Spelman College, she gave just as much — and in some cases more — to those with less grand reputations.

The Ripple Effects of MacKenzie Scott's Philanthropy

Scott donated an eye-popping $5.7 billion in 2020. It’s become clear that the impact of her donations extends well beyond the organizations that received the gifts. Read more:

• MacKenzie Scott’s No-Strings Giving Reverberates Way Beyond the Direct Beneficiaries
• Does MacKenzie Scott’s Giving Approach Signal a New Era?
• Updated: MacKenzie Scott Surprises Scores of Nonprofits With $4.2 Billion
• MacKenzie Scott Showers $1.7 Billion on Nonprofits, Mostly Groups Fighting for Equity

Prairie View is putting $10 million of Scott’s gift toward an emergency fund, which will aid juniors and seniors who have unpaid balances because of the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. Another $3 million will go to create and endow the university’s Toni Morrison Writing Program, named for the revered writer and editor who was Scott’s creative-writing professor at Princeton University as well as a mentor.

Simmons, who led Brown University from 2001 to 2012 and built up its endowment, is directing much of the rest of the Scott gift to Prairie View’s endowment.

Like most public HBCUs, Prairie View has been chronically underfunded since it was founded in 1876, Simmons says. She points out that it was created at a time when those in power operated under the racist assumption that Black people were intellectually inferior and therefore their educational institutions didn’t need as much money as the state universities that served White students.

“As an institution that was built to be ‘less than,’ the thing I wanted most to do was to use this exceptional gift for the future of the university to strengthen it and to make it possible for students to get a better education,” Simmons says. “I decided I wanted to use most of it for the endowment to provide a flow of funds to support all the things standard universities have that a college like ours doesn’t have.”

As the endowment grows over time, she says, it will provide more money for things like long-term support for scholarships, faculty development, and expansion efforts well into the future.

National Spotlight

Tougaloo College, a private 150-year-old HBCU in Jackson, Miss., is using part of the $6 million it received from Scott to honor its history in the fight for racial justice.

Built by Christian missionaries in 1869 on land that had been part of a plantation, the college later served as a refuge for civil-rights activists in the 1960s. Tougaloo opened its campus to the Freedom Riders and other civil-rights workers and leaders when many other Mississippi institutions wanted nothing to do with them.

Charles A. Smith

To keep students engaged in today’s racial-justice movement, Carmen Walters, president of Tougaloo, directed a portion of Scott’s gift toward renovations to a space that houses the college’s Reuben V. Anderson Institute for Social Justice. Anderson is an alumnus who was the first African American to hold a seat on the Mississippi Supreme Court. Launched last year, the institute is home to the college’s pre-law program, as well as public-policy, leadership-development, and social-justice programs.

Officials plan to direct roughly $2.5 million of the Scott gift to endowment and use additional money to endow scholarships, repair aging buildings, and make much-needed technology upgrades.

Walters says if the gift had been from a foundation or another philanthropist, she probably wouldn’t have had the freedom to use it for infrastructure and for programs that speak directly to the college’s civil-rights history and to today’s racial-justice movement.

“This was so different because it was like she was saying, ‘We’re going to leave this up to you as the leader to tell us where the dollars should go,’” she says.

Both Walters and Simmons say Scott’s gifts have brought their institutions a new level of national recognition, which will make it easier to reach new donors.

Simmons says Prairie View has received some small donations because of Scott’s contribution, and she expects the university will receive multimillion-dollar gifts in the future as a result of the spotlight Scott’s largess has shone on the university. Walters and Tougaloo’s head of advancement are developing a plan to highlight Scott’s gift in their efforts to attract new big donors. Walters says she is optimistic about fundraising success in the coming years.

“We’ve been getting more and more people finding out about our social-justice work,” Walters says. “It’s really allowing us to market the college and tell our story as an institution, about what we offer and how other donors can be part of what Tougaloo is doing.”