Billionaire
The sports apparel mogul, a graduate of Stanford's business school, pledged a $400 million cash gift to The Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, which will be overseen by outgoing Stanford President John Hennessy. The gift is easily one of the largest ever to a higher education institution, and follows a $400 million gift to Harvard University's engineering school from hedge fund billionaire John Paulson last year.
"I've raised a lot of money in my 15 years at Stanford, but I've never raised this much money in such a short amount of time," Hennessy said during a press conference with Knight on Wednesday.
The program will serve as a lasting legacy for Hennessy, who will become its inaugural director after officially ending his 16-year tenure as Stanford president this coming September. Each year, 100 students, who are to be nominated by their undergraduate universities, will be admitted as scholars. The program, which will be fully funded by Stanford, will allow students to pursue an interdisciplinary education that spans Stanford's seven graduate schools for three years.
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist who was named as Hennessy's successor and Stanford's 11th president earlier this month, lauded the program. "As the beneficiary of a Rhodes Scholarship, I can attest to the value of such programs to provide a broad base of knowledge and exposure to a dynamic, international network of peers," he said in a statement.
The university noted that 80% of the money--which also includes $100 million from Stanford alumnus Robert King and his wife, Dorothy, as well as $50 million from Roberta and Steve Denning, the chairman of private equity firm General Atlantic--would be spent on financial aid for the scholars.
Knight, who rarely gives public interviews and announced his intention last year to step down as Nike chairman, discussed his reasoning for backing the program during Wednesday's press conference. He is already a large Stanford benefactor and gave $105 million to build a new business school that bears his name in 2006. Knight noted that "this program will work" in helping to build future leaders.
"I get asked for a lot of donations and most of them I say 'no' to, and some I say 'I'll think about' and few I actually give to," he said. "This one was so well thought out already... When President Hennessy called me up, I said, 'Where do I sign?'"
Some critics, like author Malcolm Gladwell, have argued that multi-million dollar gifts to elite universities allow them to stockpile cash and do little to help the world. Stanford's current endowment sits at $22.2 billion as of the end of August. When asked about that critique, Knight shrugged.
"When I thought about what kind of criticism this program will get, I didn't think of that one," he said before Hennessy pointed to the 80% commitment of the endowment toward financial aid.
Applications for the program will open in the summer of 2017 and the first class of 100 students will be admitted in the fall of 2018. When it is in full operation, the program will have 300 scholars on campus along with 9,000 graduate students.
