Anonymous Donor Pledges $500 Million Matching Gift to Small Kansas College

An anonymous donor has pledged $500 million to bolster the endowment of McPherson College, a small liberal-arts college in McPherson, Kan., and to support a long-term plan to expand and modernize the campus and a number of its programs.

Among its plans, the college will create a rural and community health center, start a national center for student debt reduction, and construct a number of new buildings. The money will also help expand its unusual Automotive Restoration Technology degree program and other programs over the next decade.

“We’ll be finalizing our 10-year plan over the next couple of months as we discern and sort through all of our different priorities,” says Michael Schneider, president of McPherson College. “These dollars give us the freedom to think bigger and broader about the future.”

Under an agreement with the college, the anonymous donor will contribute $2 for every dollar given or pledged by others. The gift may be paid over time or, if it isn’t, the total will be due upon the donor’s death. If the college’s goal of raising $250 million by June 30 is met, the donor will contribute $500 million, resulting in a total of $750 million flowing into McPherson College’s endowment over time. So far, the college has raised $130 million from other donors.

A Very Quiet Campaign

Two of those donors, the Los Angeles philanthropists Melanie and Richard Lundquist, stepped in on Friday to give $25 million to the effort. Their gift adds to a $25 million unrestricted gift they gave McPherson in May. Melanie Lundquist told the Chronicle that she and her husband directed the combined $50 million from those two donations toward this fundraising effort.

The Lundquists are not McPherson alumni. They both graduated from the University of Southern California. The couple are car enthusiasts and met Schneider about 12 years ago at the annual Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, a prestigious automotive charitable event held annually in California. They came to know the college over the next decade through Schneider and through McPherson’s Automotive Restoration Technology degree program, widely believed to be the only four-year bachelor’s degree program for automobile-restoration technology in the United States.

In 2019 the couple gave the college $1 million to support the automotive program’s library and to recognize the work of the renowned car restorer Paul Russell, who has hired several McPherson College graduates and who restored the Lundquists’ 1938 Talbot-Lago T150-C SS Figoni and Falaschi Teardrop Cabriolet. Before that gift, Melanie Lundquist donated $5,000 to the program as a tradition the two have of celebrating each other’s birthdays by giving to nonprofits.

Melanie Lundquist says she and her husband gave the additional $25 million because they’d been impressed with the college as they’d gotten to know it and its students over the years .

“We’ve come to appreciate small liberal-arts colleges with 35 people in class. I graduated from USC where you’d have 200 to 300 students in a lecture hall, and this is so much more of a personalized environment,” Lundquist says. “Small liberal-arts colleges are dying from lack of money, and they’re the backbone of secondary education in this country. Not everybody goes to Harvard or Yale, and so we have to have these schools. I see the students here turn out very differently because they have an ongoing relationship and contact with their professors and other students in a smaller environment, and that really leads to a lot more creativity and innovation.”

Lundquist says neither she nor her husband is the anonymous donor and that she only recently found out who the donor is. Schneider would not offer any clues about the donor, who he says is extremely private and loath to attract attention.

“The donor has asked for only one thing from us, and that’s to remain anonymous so we’re not sharing anything about them,” Schneider says. “But the rationale behind this is they want all the attention to be on the college.”

Schneider says the college began quietly contacting other donors about six months ago. He says that while the college couldn’t reveal to its supporters who the anonymous donor is, officials were allowed to tell other supporters how much the anonymous donor was promising the college and about the match. He says the college has a robust pool of donors, many of whom are affluent, interested in bolstering the endowment, and eager to contribute.

“We ran this as you would any quiet phase of a campaign. It was just a lot quieter in that we shared the fact that this was confidential and went to people we knew we could trust,” Schneider says. “People understood the importance and significance of this gift, and when we asked them to please keep it confidential, amazingly, they did.”