U. of Colorado Business School Wins $35-Million; Other Gifts

Four universities have received large donations:

• A New York family has pledged $35-million to endow the business school at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

  The pledge comes from Gerry and Lilo Leeds, who founded CMP Media, a publishing company in Manhasset, N.Y., and their four sons and their spouses: Dan and his wife, Sunita; Greg; Michael, a former chief executive of CMP Media, and his wife, Andrea; and Richard and his wife, Anne Kroeker. Other family members contributed to the gift but wish to remain anonymous.

  Michael and Richard Leeds graduated from the university.

• A New York financier has bequeathed timberland worth $21.2-million to Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Ind. The gift from Fred van Eck, who died last year, will support the department of forestry and natural resources and its hardwood-tree research program.
• The University of Texas has received a $20-million pledge from George Mitchell, who founded Mitchell Energy & Development Corporation, and his wife, Cynthia, to help construct a biomedical research building at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
• Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi has received $18-million in stock from Michael O’Connor, chairman of the Hanover Compressor Company, in Houston. The donation will help construct a building for the business college.

Other large gifts:

Children’s Memorial Foundation (Chicago): $10-million pledge from an anonymous donor for a pediatric-research program. Of the total, $5-million was an outright donation; the remainder will come from the donor’s estate.

Colonial Williamsburg (Va.): $2.7-million from Abby O’Neill, of Oyster Bay, N.Y., whose grandparents, John D. Jr. and Abby Rockefeller, founded the organization and bequeathed their home — Bassett Hall — to it, and her husband, George, chairman of Meriwether Capital Corporation, an investment company, to renovate Bassett Hall.

Cornell U. (Ithaca, N.Y.): $1-million from Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, for the burn unit at the university’s medical center, in New York, which is treating people injured in the World Trade Center attack.

Triangle Community Foundation (Durham, N.C.): $2-million from John Morse, of Raleigh, N.C., and his wife, Libby, for a fund to support the Integrative Strategies Forum, a nonprofit group in Washington that works to tackle global issues like poverty, population growth, epidemics, and the environment.

U. of Idaho (Moscow): $6-million bequest from Burton F. (Humpy) Ellis, of Merced, Calif., a lawyer who died last year, to endow a fund for academic programs.

U. of Illinois Foundation (Urbana): $5-million in land and a charitable trust from Kenneth and Vesta Stark, of Pittsfield, Ill., who own banks in Pittsfield, Mount Sterling, and Plymouth, Ill., for scholarships in the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences; $2-million from Robert Campbell, of Los Angeles, who founded the Robert Campbell Company, a real-estate finance company, and his wife, Alice, the former treasurer of the company, to endow a professorship in law, support a campus-wide professorship, endow a scholarship program, and help purchase bells for the Altgeld Carillon; a $2-million pledge from Ed Rowe, of Racine, Wis., a retired manager of the J.I. Case Company, a manufacturer, and his wife, Barbara, to add to a scholarship the couple created in memory of their son, David; a $1.1-million pledge from Chester W. Houston, of Urbana, Ill., a retired professor of microbiology at the University of Rhode Island, and his wife, Nadine C. Houston, a former librarian, to support fellowships and faculty in the microbiology department and the cell and structural biology department, and support the graduate school of library and information science, and the university’s library; a $1-million pledge from C.J. (Joe) Gauthier, of Salem, Ill., retired president of NICOR, a gas company, to establish a program for exploratory studies in the mechanical and industrial engineering department; and a $1-million pledge from Kim Pollock, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., a retired information-systems executive, and his wife, Michelle, for a university program that helps students with disabilities.

Western Maryland College (Westminster): $2.9-million bequest from Samuel H. Hoover, a retired dental surgeon in Dundalk, Md., who died last year, and his wife, Elsie, who died in 1995, for scholarships and to create an endowment fund for the college’s library.