Nike founder Phil Knight is no stranger to big philanthropic gifts, and the University of Oregon is no stranger to receiving them.
Nonetheless, when Mr. Knight called up the school president earlier in September, it’s fair to say he left a few jaws needing to be picked up off the floor.
The news—that he and his wife Penny were going to be making a donation of $1 billion to U. of Oregon—has allowed the school to move forward long-standing plans to establish an entirely new college—one of engineering.
Knight’s name is already easily found across the school campus, from the law center to the sports complexes to the library, and his foundation had already given the university $1 billion in combined gifts over the decades. The institution is sometimes referred to as the University of Nike.
“One of the most successful businesspeople in the history of humanity, and one of the most generous philanthropists in the history of humanity, has said higher education is worth an investment of this magnitude,” Karl Scholz, Oregon’s president, said in an interview, adding that the staggering gift was “a screaming endorsement of the importance of what we’re doing.”
The university’s vice-president Bob Guldberg says the money will allow the school to combine a variety of disparate educational offerings into a full-bore undergraduate program for engineering in a state that is experiencing, according to the New York Times, a shortage of engineers.
Guldberg and Scholz have for years kept Mr. Knight abreast of their plans for the University of Oregon, but Scholz said that the call he received was not on his planner for that day as he sat in a San Francisco airport terminal.
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The Times believes that the gesture is the largest single donation to an American public university in history. Oregon has for years enjoyed the company of out-of-state students, though staff are expecting this to dry up in the coming years, such that Scholz has recently planned $65 million worth of budget cuts.
Larger donations have been made—several times by Michael Bloomberg—to private universities like Johns Hopkins, and other 10-figure contributions have been made in recent American history to university medical centers—including one by Mr. Knight.
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The Knights have declined to be interviewed since the news broke, but they did release a statement regarding it.
“To make an audacious dream a reality requires more than a vivid imagination,” Mr. Knight said. “It also requires the sort of opportunity that our great American universities, both public and private, have historically provided. This is no time to abandon them.”
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