A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Washington and Lee University
The financier William (Bill) Miller gave $132 million to allow the university to implement a need-blind admissions policy for all undergraduate students and provide loan-free financial-aid packages for academically qualified students accepted into the university regardless of their families’ ability to pay for tuition, room, board, and the other attendance costs.
Miller founded the investment bank Miller Value Partners and is a former portfolio manager at Legg Mason Capital Management Value Trust, an investment and assets-management firm in Baltimore that was acquired by Franklin Templeton Investments in 2020.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Washington and Lee in 1972 and then served in Vietnam as a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army. After his tour in the military, Miller pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University before starting a career in finance. Before joining Legg Mason, he served as treasurer of the JE Baker Company, which operated quarries in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and West Virginia. He retired from Miller Value Partners in 2023.
Miller is generally quiet about his charitable giving but has publicly given several multimillion-dollar gifts to higher education in recent years, and he has landed on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of biggest donors twice since 2018.
University of Rochester Medical Center
E. Philip Saunders pledged $30 million to back research and clinical programs in orthopedics, support faculty in the School of Medicine and Dentistry, and help nursing students. Saunders has earmarked $25 million of the donation to support research and other programs in the Saunders Center for Orthopaedics and Physical Performance.
The remaining $5 million will establish a professorship in orthopedics at the School of Medicine and Dentistry and to launch and endow a new scholarship fund in the School of Nursing. Those scholarships will benefit staff members at UR Medicine Noyes Health, a health care center in Dansville, N.Y., where Saunders grew up and still owns a home.
Saunders founded several Rochester-area companies, including Genesee Regional Bank, Truck Stops of America, and Travel Centers of America. His business portfolio spans auto rental, recreation, tourism, packaged foods, property management, and banking. Including this latest pledge, Saunders has given roughly $54 million to Rochester-area nonprofits over the last 15 years.
Clemson University
David and Lynette Snow gave $25 million to expand the work of what has been renamed the Snow Institute for the Study of Capitalism. Some of the gift will support the institute’s Lyceum Scholars Program and double the number of students who receive the scholarships from 40 to 80 students.
The Snows are not Clemson alumni. They got to know the university through their daughter, Ashley, who graduated from Clemson in 2015. The couple’s donation kicks off Clemson’s fundraising effort to raise $100 million for the study of capitalism.
David Snow founded and leads Cedar Gate Technologies, a health care analytics company he launched 10 years ago. He previously founded the drug developer AmeriChoice, which he sold to United Healthcare in 1993 for $570 million. He went on to lead Oxford Health Plans and then Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield. He later managed Medco Health Solutions’ spinoff from its parent company, Merck & Company, in 2003. He started his career in hospital administration.
University of Michigan Medical School
Gilbert Omenn and Martha Darling gave $25 million to support several programs in the newly named Gilbert S. Omenn Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, and to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration between basic scientists and clinical investigators throughout departments. It will also back artificial intelligence-driven research programs.
Dr. Omenn is the university’s Harold T. Shapiro Distinguished University Professor of Medicine: He also holds professorships there in computational medicine and bioinformatics, internal medicine, human genetics, and environmental health sciences.
He co-founded the multidisciplinary, cross-university Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics in 2005 and served as executive vice president for medical affairs and as CEO of the University of Michigan Health System from 1997 to 2002. He was dean of the School of Public Health and professor of medicine and environmental health at the University of Washington from 1982 to 1997. His research focuses on proteogenomics of cancers and proteome informatics.
Martha Darling has had a varied career. She was a senior manager at Boeing, vice president for strategic planning at Seattle-First National Bank, and executive director of the Washington Business Roundtable’s Education Study. As a White House fellow in the late 1970s, she served as executive assistant to Secretary of the Treasury W. Michael Blumenthal and later was a senior legislative aide to U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley. She started her career working as a freelance consultant in Paris to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, where she analyzed women’s roles in the economies of the group’s member countries.
Portions of the couple’s donation will be used to create a fund to support collaborative work, establish a department chair position and an associated endowed fund, and launch the Bioinformatics Graduate Program Endowed Fund to support the department’s master of science and Ph.D. training programs. The money will also be used to establish five endowed research professorships, set up an endowment to support faculty retention and recruitment, and pay for the acquisition and maintenance of advanced computing hardware, software, and services.
University of Maine Foundation
Pierre (Pete) Labat and Catherine Clair Labat left $16 million to support the Department of Athletics and establish the Pierre D. Labat and Catherine C. Labat Athletic Leadership Fund, which will support student-athletes and the university’s athletic facilities.
Pete Labat was a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. A member of the university’s football team, he earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1962 and joined the military soon after. He went on to serve primarily in Vietnam during the war there, and later in the Middle East. He retired from the military in 1986. The Labats met in Iran, where Pete was stationed and where Catherine was working as a physical therapist. Catherine died in 2021, and Pete passed away last year.
Cornell University College of Human Ecology
Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs gave $15 million to endow and name the Joan Klein Jacobs Center for Precision Nutrition and Health in the College of Human Ecology, and enhance interdisciplinary programs across the university, Cornell Tech, and Weill Cornell Medicine campuses.
The center has been renamed for Jacobs’s late wife, Joan, who was a Cornell alumna and died last year at 91. Joan Jacobs earned a bachelor’s degree in nutrition from the university in 1954 and trained as a dietitian. She went on to work for Groton Central Schools, in Groton, N.Y., and later at Boston Lying-in Hospital, now Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Irwin Jacobs co-founded the technology giant Qualcomm in 1985. He was a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California at San Diego from 1966 to 1972, and during that time he co-founded the Linkabit Corporation, which developed a satellite-encryption device. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Cornell in 1956.
The couple have given large sums to dozens of nonprofits over the years, including in 2013 when they gave $133 million to Cornell and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to establish the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute at Cornell Tech, the university’s science and engineering graduate school on Roosevelt Island, in New York. They have appeared on the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors 18 times over the last two decades. Their latest gift adds to the $10 million Jacobs gave Cornell last year to help establish the Center for Precision Nutrition and Health.
Louisiana State University
Art Favre gave $15 million to support the construction of a facility within the Bert S. Turner Department of Construction Management. The new building will provide the department with additional lab and faculty offices and increased space for advanced manufacturing and machining programs.
Favre founded Performance Contractors, a Baton Rouge, La., firm that builds oil refineries, power plants, and other industrial facilities throughout the country. He is a graduate of the university’s first construction-management class in 1972 and started his career with an industrial company that built refineries and chemical plants. He started Performance Contractors in 1979.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
