A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
University of Alabama School of Law
Hugh Culverhouse Jr. and his wife, Eliza, pledged $25 million to establish the Hugh F. Culverhouse Jr. School of Law Endowment for Excellence, enabling the law school to expand, create new programs, and support scholarships and a law library.
Hugh Culverhouse owns Palmer Ranch Holdings, a 10,000-acre planned community in Sarasota County, Fla. The couple have given the university a total of more than $35 million over the past decade.
University of Denver
Doug and Mary Scrivner donated $15 million to the Scrivner Institute of Public Policy and other programs.
Doug Scrivner is a retired general counsel or Accenture, a management consulting firm. He earned a law degree from the university in 1977. He served as chairman of the Board of Trustees from 2014 to 2018 and has served as an adjunct professor at Sturm College of Law.
University of Texas at San Antonio
Graham Weston gave $15 million to back the university’s new School of Data Science, which will offer programs in cybersecurity, big data, cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Weston founded Weston Urban, a real-estate development firm in San Antonio, and co-founded Rackspace Hosting, a web-hosting and cloud-computing company, which the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management bought in 2016 for $4.3 billion.
Ventura College Foundation
Miriam Schwab left $12 million to the foundation. Of that amount, $10.2 million will go to the college’s Instrumental Music Program and will support a violin and viola competition and the college’s symphony orchestra. It will also establish a summer music institute. She designated the remaining $1.8 million to go to the college’s aquatics program.
Schwab, who died last year at 89, was the widow of Henry Schwab Jr., an heir to an oil fortune who worked as a concert violinist. Miriam Schwab was also a musician. She played the violin with the Ventura College Symphony Orchestra for over a decade and started the Henry Schwab Violin Competition 11 years ago.
Cornelius Arts Center
Bill and Ericka Cain gave $5 million to help build the new performing- and visual-arts complex and community center, which will be named for the couple.
The Cains founded Financial Independence Group, an insurance company in Cornelius, N.C.
University of Toronto
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman gave nearly $2.5 million to establish a professorship to study how the new era of artificial intelligence will affect people’s lives.
Hoffman is a partner at the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Greylock Partners and a founding director of PayPal.
American Red Cross and Foundation for the Carolinas
Basketball great Michael Jordan donated $2 million for Hurricane Florence relief efforts.
He is directing $1 million to the American Red Cross for its work providing food and shelter to the thousands of people displaced by the hurricane and $1 million to the Foundation for the Carolinas’ Hurricane Florence Response Fund, which is directing money to North and South Carolina nonprofits that are providing relief to storm victims.
Jordan is chairman of the Charlotte Hornets, a National Basketball Association team. He played basketball for 15 seasons for the Chicago Bulls and the Washington Wizards.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.
Correction: A previous version of this article said Reid Hoffman’s gift to the University of Toronto was $2.3 million, not $2.5 million.
