A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
University of South Carolina
Joseph Rice gave $30 million to establish and endow a scholarship fund for law school students that will back full and partial scholarships and establish several new professorships within the newly named Joseph F. Rice School of Law. The money will also support stipends for students completing a children’s-law concentration, as well as career, professional development, and other programs for law students.
Rice is a trial lawyer who co-founded Motley Rice, a law firm with headquarters in Mount Pleasant, S.C. He is known in legal circles for negotiating the $206 billion Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, a historic 1998 settlement between the four largest U.S. tobacco companies and 46 states seeking to recover health-care costs from the companies. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the university in 1976 and a J.D. from its law school in 1979.
California Institute of Technology
Ross Brown pledged $400 million to establish the Brown Institute for Basic Science, which will back scientific research at other universities and will be home to the Ross Brown Investigators Award Program. Brown created the program in 2020 to provide five-year, $2 million awards to 13 mid-career, tenured faculty working on chemistry and physics research.
Brown founded Cryogenic Industries, a company that made cryogenic equipment for the industrial gas and energy industry, in the 1960s. He sold the company to Nikkiso in 2017. He earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Caltech in 1956 and 1957, respectively.
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Howard Meyers pledged $25 million through his Meyers Foundation to establish the Meyers Institute for Oncology Nursing, a center that will address the oncology nursing shortages at most U.S. health-care organizations. The gift will also create programs to help nurses throughout their careers by providing educational, professional, and wellness programs tailored to cancer-care nurses.
Meyers leads Quexco Incorporated, a metals company headquartered in Dallas. He started his career while he was in college and worked at a metals smelter and refinery and went on to work for American Metal Climax in the 1960s. In 1970 he teamed up with several other investors to buy the company that became Quexco. His late wife, Rose-Marie (Rory) Meyers, was a nurse.
Perez Art Museum Miami
Darlene and Jorge Pérez gave $25 million for endowment. The museum was named for the couple in 2011 when they donated $15 million along with a valuable trove of Latin American art to the museum’s permanent collection. They also gave the museum $10 million for endowment in 2016.
Jorge Pérez co-founded and leads the Related Group, a real-estate development company in Miami. Earlier in his career, he served as economic development director for the city of Miami. He served on the Miami Foundation’s Board of Trustees from 1991 through 1996. In 2015 he established the Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at the Miami Foundation. Through their foundation, the couple support Miami-area charities focused on health and well-being, education, the environment, and economic development.
University Hospitals
Dee and Jimmy Haslam gave $20 million to establish a sports medicine and research center in Cleveland that will be named the Haslam Sports Innovation Center.
Dee and Jimmy Haslam are managing partners of the Haslam Sports Group, through which they own the Cleveland Browns football team. They are also part owners of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, and they own a stake in the Columbus Crew, a professional soccer club in Columbus, Ohio.
The couple and other members of their family have given extensively to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The family has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors twice over the last decade as the result of those gifts.
Saint Louis Art Museum
Emily Rauh Pulitzer pledged $10 million to create and endow the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Deputy Director and Chief Curator, a senior leadership post overseeing curatorial departments and other areas of the museum’s collection and exhibition programs.
Pulitzer served as the head curator at the museum in the 1960s, and as assistant curator of drawings at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum earlier in her career. Her late husband, Joseph Pulitzer III, was the publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper for 38 years. He died in 1993. The Pulitzer Prizes are named for his grandfather, who also served as publisher of the Post-Dispatch.
In 2021, Pulitzer pledged to donate 22 works of art to the museum, including paintings by Picasso and Miro and a sculpture by Brancusi. She is a longtime donor to art institutions and journalism programs. In 2016, she gave $12 million to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, where she is president of the Board of Directors.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
