Colgate Gets $25 Million for Residence Halls and Financial Aid (Gifts Roundup)

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Morehouse College

The billionaire financier Robert Smith announced Sunday in a commencement speech that he plans to give an estimated $40 million to pay off all of the 2019 graduating class’s student loans.

Smith founded and leads the private-equity firm Vista Equity Partners and has given extensively to nonprofits in recent years. Previously quiet about his giving, he made a splash in 2016 when gave away a total of more than $42 million. He has appeared twice on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors.

Bravo Family Foundation

San Francisco Financier Orland Bravo gave $100 million to his foundation to develop programs to help Puerto Ricans establish technology businesses that will benefit people on the island and to promote entrepreneurship in Puerto Rico more broadly.

Bravo co-founded Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm in Chicago and San Francisco that invests in technology services and software companies. He was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, and gave $10 million in 2017 to aid Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria hit the island in September of that year.

St. Francis Xavier Parish and St. Mary Catholic Church

Jim and Miriam Mulva gave $27 million to the two De Pere, Wis., Catholic parishes for two building projects: a new three-story Notre Dame of De Pere School that will serve students from early childhood through eighth grade, and a new parish hall for St. Francis Xavier.

Jim Mulva is a retired chairman and chief executive of Phillips Petroleum Company and, later ConocoPhillips, an energy corporation headquartered in Houston.

The couple grew up in De Pere, and earlier this month they pledged $50 million to create the Mulva Cultural Center there, which will feature exhibit and performance spaces, classrooms, and a veterans’ memorial.

Colgate University

Steve and Gretchen Burke donated $10 million for a new residence hall, which will be named for them.

Steve Burke is CEO and president of NBC, and he formerly served as president of Comcast Cable, president of ABC Broadcasting, and president and COO of Euro Disney S.A. He earned a history degree from Colgate in 1980.

Gretchen Burke, a retired banker, is also a Colgate alumnus. She earned a degree in English in 1981 and has served on the university’s Board of Trustees since 2011.

The university also received $15 million from an anonymous couple to support and name another residence hall after Colgate’s first female professor, Jane Pinchin, who joined the university in 1965, and to back financial aid.

Dartmouth College

Gregg and Molly Engles pledged $10 million to support the development of an arts district, back faculty recruitment and the Dartmouth College Fund, and help other programs.

Gregg Engles is a founding partner of Capitol Peak Partners, a private equity firm, in Denver. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1979 and serves on its Board of Trustees.

University of Wisconsin at Madison

Former U.S. Senator Herb Kohl donated $10 million through his Herb Kohl Philanthropies to the La Follette School of Public Affairs for the Kohl Initiative, an effort to expand the school’s public-outreach programs, advance leadership training for students, and support research.

Kohl is a former president of his family’s Kohl’s Department Stores, and he served from 1989 to 2013 as a U.S. senator from Wisconsin. He appeared on the Chronicle’s 2014 Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors for a $100 million gift he gave to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.

Rochester Institute of Technology

Chance Wright and his mother, Pamela Mars Wright, gave $3.5 million to the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences.

Chance Wright earned a degree in advertising photography from the institute in 2018 and an MBA from RIT’s Saunders College of Business this month.

Pamela Mars Wright is a billionaire heiress who worked for many years for her family’s 107-year-old confectionery company, Mars Inc., first as an operations supervisor, then as a plant director and a manufacturing director at Mars Australia. She served as chairman of the company from 2004 to 2008.

American Academy in Rome

Musa and Thomas Mayer gave $3 million to establish Philip Guston Rome Prize in Visual Arts, named for Musa Mayer’s late father, Philip Guston, a renowned abstract expressionist artist who died in 1980.

Musa Mayer is a writer, and Thomas Mayer is a neuropsychologist. Philip Guston received a fellowship for artists from the academy in 1948, which his daughter credited with helping to further Guston’s work.

“When my father was awarded the Rome Prize in 1948, he was at a crucial juncture in his painting,” said Musa Mayer in a news release about the gift. “In 1970, an extended stay at the academy offered the distance and perspective he needed, allowing him to continue painting unencumbered by the rejection of the New York art world.”

University of Kansas

Martha Mueller, a retired librarian, left more than $1.4 million to support the university’s libraries and to back scholarships for students with financial need.

Mueller retired in 1994 as a librarian at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, where she had worked for 25 years. She earned a bachelor’s degree in education from the university in 1955 and later traveled the world, visiting more than 20 countries and all of the lower 48 states. She died in 2018 at 83.

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