Washburn University Lands $50 Million From Alumni Couple

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Washburn University

Gregory and Ronda Brenneman gave $50 million to support a range of efforts including the construction of a new building to house all the university’s health-care-education programs. The university’s business school has been named for the couple, and its nursing school has been named for Ronda Brenneman’s late sister, Harmony Hines, who was a nurse and Washburn alumna.

Gregory Brenneman is chairman of CCMP Capital, a private-equity firm in New York. He is known in corporate circles as an expert in making troubled companies profitable again. Brenneman was a partner at the consulting firm Bain and Company earlier in his career, and from there he went on to lead the now-defunct Continental Airlines, PwC Consulting, and Burger King.

The couple are Washburn alumni and met while students there. Greg Brenneman earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and finance in 1984, and Ronda Brenneman earned a bachelor’s in education in 1984 and went on to be a teacher.

Birthright Israel Foundation

Charles Bronfman pledged $25 million to establish the Birthright Israel Fund for the Jewish Future, an effort to increase the organization’s endowment. Bronfman co-founded the organization with investor Michael Steinhardt in 1999 to pay for trips for young Jewish people to visit Israel and forge a closer connection to the country.

Bronfman is a billionaire Canadian American businessman and an heir to the Seagram Company fortune. He worked for the liquor company, eventually serving as its co-chairman, from 1951 to 2000, the year it was acquired by the French company Vivendi SA. He was the majority owner of the Montreal Expos baseball team from its creation in 1968 until 1991, when he sold the team.

University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business

Jeffery and Mindy Hildebrand gave $20 million to establish the Hildebrand MBA Excellence Fund, which will match scholarship donations from other donors, and to support leadership-development programs for students throughout the business school’s five M.B.A. programs.

The couple are University of Texas alumni. Mindy Hildebrand earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the McCombs School in 1986, and Jeffery Hildebrand earned a bachelor’s degree in geology in 1981 and a master’s degree in petroleum engineering in 1985. He co-founded and leads Hilcorp Energy Company, an oil and gas producer in Houston.

Butler University

Rebecca Graham Paul pledged $12 million to establish two endowment funds and a scholarship. Most of the money will be used to create the Rebecca Graham Paul ’70, MS ’75 Endowed Fund for Women’s Athletics Excellence, which will support a range of programs within the university’s 12 Women’s Athletics programs, including the cheerleading and dance teams.

A portion of the donation will also launch the Rebecca Graham Paul ’70, MS ’75 Athletics Leadership Academy Endowed Fund to support leadership programs for all Butler student athletes, and establish the Terry Paul ’68 Memorial College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Endowed Scholarship. The scholarship is named for Paul’s late husband, who earned a master’s degree in history and political science from the university in 1968.

Paul is president and CEO of the Tennessee Education Lottery Corporation and formerly led the World Lottery Association. She previously led state lotteries in Florida, Georgia, and Illinois. She has served on Butler’s Board of Trustees since 2019.

Cleveland Public Theatre

Joan Yellen Horvitz left the performing-arts complex $6 million, of which $4 million will be used to establish the Joan Yellen Horvitz director fellowship and $2 million will support renovations to the former St. Mary’s Orthodox Church on the theater’s campus.

Yellen Horvitz was a couturier who designed costumes and sets for dance and theater. Based in Cleveland, she designed the costumes for several Cleveland Public Theatre productions over the years, and some of her work is in the collections of Kent State University Museum, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and Ursuline College’s Historical Costume Study Collection. She died in 2021.

Tampa General Hospital Foundation

Tara Ruberg gave $4 million to launch the David & Tara Ruberg HVI Innovation and Research Center of Excellence, which will be housed within the hospital’s Heart & Vascular Institute. Researchers at the center will work on developing new approaches to cardiovascular medicine.

Ruberg’s late husband, David, was CEO of InterXion, a cloud-computing company, and served as chairman of Digex, an early 1990s internet provider. Earlier, he worked at Bell Labs on an antiballistic-missile-system team and went on to serve in executive posts at At&T and Baker Capital. He died in 2023.

To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.