Bose Corp. Founder Gives Most of Company Stock to MIT

The founder of the Bose Corporation has given the majority of his company’s stock to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, according to a statement Friday by the university.

Amar Bose, who founded the audio-technology company in 1964, has given the stock in the form of non-voting shares. MIT cannot sell the shares, the gift agreement specifies, or participate in the management or governance of the privately-held Bose Corporation, in Framingham, Mass.

A company spokesman reported to Boston.com that the Bose Corporation earned revenues of more than $2-billlion in 2010.

Mr. Bose received a bachelor’s, masters, and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from MIT, and was a member of its faculty from 1956 to 2001. He will remain his company’s chairman and technical director.

In a letter to Bose Corporation employees, Mr. Bose paid tribute to professors at MIT who served as his mentors, and said his gift to the university represents a long-held wish to help support it.

The university will use the gift “to sustain and advance MIT’s education and research mission,” according to a statement by the institution. In a statement posted by the university, its president, Susan Hockfield said Mr. Bose “serves as a superb example for MIT graduates who yearn to cut their own path.”

She added that he “set the highest teaching standards, for which he is still admired and loved by his faculty colleagues and the many students he taught. His insatiable curiosity propelled remarkable research, both at MIT and within the company he founded. Dr. Bose has always been more concerned about the next two decades than about the next two quarters.”