A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
University of California at Berkeley Haas School of Business
Warren (Ned) and Carol Spieker gave $30 million to expand the business school’s undergraduate business program from a two-year to a four-year program and to endow scholarships within the program. The money will also go toward more paying for more academic and admissions advisers, mental-health services, new technology and equipment, experiential learning workshops, and other programs.
University officials plan to name the Haas School’s four-year undergraduate business program for the Spiekers. The first four-year cohort of students will enroll in August 2024. The couple are UC Berkeley alumni. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business, and she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. They both graduated in 1966.
Ned Spieker founded Spieker Properties, a commercial real-estate development company in Menlo Park, Calif. He sold the company to Equity Office Properties Trust in 2001 for $7.2 billion. He went on to found Spieker Continuing Life, a company that develops and operates retirement communities in California. He also owns agriculture properties.
University of Iowa College of Education
Mary Bucksbaum Scanlan and her husband, Patrick Scanlan, gave $15 million through their Scanlan Family Foundation to support training and research programs in the school of mental health. The money will be used by both the mental health school and a center at the university that provides programs for “gifted and talented” children to hire more psychologists and social workers to work with young people in area schools.
The couple co-founded Woody Creek Distillers, a Basalt, Colo., company that makes vodka and whiskeys. Bucksbaum Scanlan grew up in Des Moines and is the daughter of the late Martin Bucksbaum, one of the founders of General Growth Properties, a shopping-mall developer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Patrick Scanlan is a retired engineer who worked for the technology giant IBM Federal Systems and for the aerospace company Lockheed Martin.
University of Texas at Tyler School of Medicine
Robyn Malone Rogers gave $10 million through her Robert M. Rogers Foundation to support mental- and behavioral-health education programs. University officials plan to name the department of psychiatry for Robert Rogers, the donor’s late husband.
A portion of the gift will be used to establish the Robert M. Rogers Scholarship and mental-health curriculum in the School of Medicine. The money will also support faculty positions in the School of Medicine, School of Nursing, and the Ben and Maytee Fisch College of Pharmacy.
Robyn Rogers is president of the Robert M. Rogers Foundation. Her late husband, Robert, founded what became TCA Cable TV in Tyler, Tex., in 1954. He died from in 1997 at 71.
Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation
Max and Joyce Wildman left $8 million to support patient care at Hazelden Betty Ford, a mental-health and addiction treatment center in Center City, Minn. The money will also back the organization’s advocacy, education, and research efforts.
Max Wildman was a well-known Chicago trial lawyer and founder of the national law firm Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon. He served with the U.S. Army Air Force in the Pacific during World War II before returning to college and earning a law degree. He worked early in his career as an attorney for the firm that would become Kirkland & Ellis and left to start his own firm in 1967. He died in 2011 at 91. Joyce Wildman died in 2019.
University of Houston
The Dakri family pledged $4 million to support the Center for Economic Inclusion in the C.T. Bauer College of Business. The center, which will be named for the donors, offers programs that train students in business development and helps local underresourced entrepreneurs launch businesses. The gift will be used to establish an endowed chairmanship, a professorship, and a research fund.
Musa Dakri founded Dakri Real Estate Holdings and in 1991 bought Wallis Bank, in Houston, where he now serves as chairman.. His wife, Khaleda Dakri, is a former chemist. Their sons, Asif and Faizel, serve as Wallis Bank’s chief executive officer and chief information officer, respectively. The couple grew up in India and emigrated to the United States in the 1970s.
Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas
Margaret Silva gave $3 million to endow the Arts Research Integration program, which embeds artists in high-level research projects across the university’s sciences and humanities departments. Silva also pledged an additional $1 million challenge gift to match donations up to $1 million from other donors.
Silva is a Kansas City philanthropist who founded and led Grand Arts, a nonprofit art center that provided space to artists from around the world. It shuttered in 2015 when Silva retired.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
