A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Spelman College, Morehouse College, United Negro College Fund
Billionaires Reed Hastings and Patty Quillin gave $40 million apiece to each of the three organizations primarily to back scholarships.
The gifts to the two historically Black colleges, Spelman and Morehouse, will support full four-year scholarships, and Hastings directed that the scholarships for Morehouse students be named for Michael Lomax, president and chief executive of the United Negro College Fund and a Morehouse graduate.
The scholarships at Spelman will be named for Spelman alumna Dovey Johnson Roundtree, a civil-rights and criminal-defense attorney whose 1955 bus desegregation case helped dismantle the racist practice of separate but equal. The donation to the UNCF will also go toward scholarships and its efforts to support historically black colleges and universities.
Hastings co-founded the streaming company Netflix. He started a donor-advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation with $100 million in 2016.
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
Ronald and Eileen Weiser pledged $30 million to establish the Elizabeth Weiser Caswell Diabetes Institute. The new research center is named for the couple’s daughter, who has two sons and a husband with Type 1 diabetes.
The couple are University of Michigan alumni. He graduated in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and went on to found McKinley Associates, a real-estate investment firm. He served as U.S. ambassador to Slovakia from 2001 to 2004.
Eileen Weiser graduated in 1975 with a master’s degree in music. The couple have given extensively to the university over the years and landed on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors in 2014 for a $50 million gift to the university.
University of South Florida Health Morsani College of Medicine
Dr. Jack Ross left more than $4 million to the medical school to support the Jack F. Ross Medical Scholarship, which he started some years ago.
Ross was a retired Tampa psychiatrist, who in the 1980s worked at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital. He also taught in the university’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavior for 20 years. He died last year at 98.
Indiana University Kelley School of Business
William Bogner and Pamela Barr gave $1 million to create a scholarship to help students who struggle to complete their education because of finances, particularly after their freshman year.
Bognar and Barr are retired professors and administrators at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. Bogner earned a bachelor of science in business from IU in 1977. He founded Nancy Creek Consulting and works as an actor.
Barr served as chair of the Department of Managerial Sciences at the Robinson College for six years and is a professor emerita at Georgia State.
Prairie View A&M University
Charles Butt donated $1 million to establish the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice, named for the university’s president. Simmons is a well-respected leader in higher education and served as president of Brown University from 2001 to 2012 and of Smith College from 1995 to 2001. She came out of retirement to lead Prairie View.
Butt heads the family-owned supermarket chain H-E-B and is a prolific donor to education groups. In 2006, he founded Raise Your Hand Texas, an education advocacy and incubator organization, and in 2017 he committed $100 million
to start the Holdsworth Center, a leadership institute focused on training public-school administrators.
University of Missouri
Reuben Merideth pledged $1 million to support the College of Veterinary Medicine’s Dean’s Fund for Excellence, which can back a variety of the veterinary college’s needs.
Merideth is an animal ophthalmologist. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1970 and a doctoral degree in veterinary medicine in 1978, both from MU. In 1981 he founded Eye Care for Animals, a veterinary ophthalmology organization.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.
