A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
University of Virginia
Jaffray and Merrill Woodriff gave $120 million through their Quantitative Foundation to launch the new School of Data Science. The money will also help pay for a new building to house the new college, endow doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships there, and create a fund for visiting scholars.
Jaffray Woodriff co-founded the Charlottesville, Va., hedge fund Quantitative Investment Management and graduated from the university in 1991. Merrill Woodriff is a former teacher who owns and co-directs a yoga center. She earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the university in 1998. Before their latest donation, the Woodriffs had given a total of more than $30 million to their alma mater.
Madison Youth Arts Center
Pleasant Rowland pledged $20 million to build a new arts center, which is scheduled to open next year. The center will house Children’s Theater of Madison, Madison youth choirs, and provide space for local arts groups that serve youths.
Rowland founded the Pleasant Company and the American Girl doll brand in 1986. She sold the company to Mattel in 1998 for $700 million. She later bought and restructured a home decor company, MacKenzie-Childs, and sold it in 2008 to Twin Lakes Capital, a private-equity firm. Rowland is a longtime donor to arts and culture groups in Madison, Wis.
University of Florida Health
Lee and Lauren Fixel donated $20 million through their Fixel Family Foundation to establish the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases. The center will focus on advancing research, technological discoveries, and clinical care for Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. The university plans to match the gift.
Lee Fixel is a partner with the investment firm Tiger Global Management, where he leads the private-equity business. His father, Norman Fixel, earned a bachelor’s degree in business from the university in 1975, and Lauren Fixel is also a UF graduate, with a 2007 bachelor’s degree in journalism.
McGill University
Leslie and Judy Vadasz gave $15 million through their Vadasz Family Foundation for the Vadasz Doctoral Fellowships program in McGill’s Faculty of Engineering.
The couple endowed the program in 2008, and their latest gift will provide financial support to doctoral students for a longer period.
Les Vadasz is a Hungarian-American engineer best known in tech circles as a founding member of the management team of the Intel Corporation. He worked for the pioneering company from its founding in 1968 to his retirement in 2003. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the university in 1961.
Turrell Art Foundation
Kanye West pledged $10 million to back the completion of artist James Turrell’s work-in-progress, the Roden Crater Project.
Turrell has been working on the project since the 1970s to convert a dormant volcanic crater in the Painted Desert near Flagstaff, Ariz., into a series of viewing spaces, tunnels, chambers, and pathways that will offer visitors a variety of visual and auditory experiences.
West is a musician and record producer. Along with a number of different business ventures, he founded the production company and record label Good Music in partnership with Sony BMG.
University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
Ilene Forsyth gave $8.2 million to establish the George H. and Ilene H. Forsyth Professorship in Medieval Art and to create the Ilene H. Forsyth Fund, which will back postdoctoral fellowships, a visiting scholars program, a student and faculty exchange program, study trips for art history students, and other efforts.
Forsyth is the university’s professor emerita of History of Art and a former Arthur F. Thurnau Professor. She has produced an extensive body of work in medieval art, including the prize-winning book The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculpture of the Madonna in Romanesque France. She came to the university in 1962 and taught for 35 years, retiring in 1997.
The professorship her gift is creating is named partially for her late husband, George Forsyth Jr., a medieval architectural historian who led the university’s Department of History of Art and directed the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. He died in 1991.
University of Minnesota
James and Carmen Campbell donated $8 million to renovate and modernize the 116-year-old building that houses the Institute of Child Development on the university’s Twin Cities campus.
Jim Campbell led Norwest Bank Minnesota for 12 years before managing its 1998 merger with Wells Fargo, becoming chairman and chief executive of Wells Fargo Bank Minnesota. He graduated in 1964 from the university’s Carlson School of Management.
Carmen Campbell is a 1964 graduate of the university’s College of Education and Human Development. The Campbells have given the university more than $16 million for a number of programs over the years.
University of Chicago Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
David and Colleen Kessenich gave $5 million to support faculty-led research and other programs at the Polsky Center, which helps students, faculty, staff, and alumni launch and grow their businesses. The faculty director post will be named for the donors.
David Kessenich co-founded and leads the Denver-based private-equity firm Excellere Partners. He earned an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1996.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.
