Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, are giving the University of Oregon – his alma mater – a whopping $1 billion to launch an engineering school.
The gift, announced Wednesday, will establish the Knight College of Engineering at the university’s Eugene campus. Until now, Oregon has not offered a traditional engineering degree program.
The donation is the largest in the university’s history and the largest “given to a comprehensive public university,” according to the school’s news release about the gift. It follows a previous grant worth hundreds of millions of dollars in 2016. As of Wednesday, Phil Knight and his family have a net worth estimated at $25.1 billion, Forbes reports.
“Phil and Penny Knight have a long history of believing in things before they exist,” University of Oregon President Karl Scholz said in a statement. “They did it in 2016, and they are doing it again now, at a scale that is genuinely hard to take in. I am grateful to them, and I am grateful to be here for it.”
Knight’s connection to Oregon dates back to his days as a track athlete at the university, where he ran under coach Bill Bowerman before earning a business degree in 1959. The pair later founded Nike, which grew into a global sportswear giant and is headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon.
The new college will build on the university’s existing science programs, including the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. The campus focuses on bioengineering, biomedical data science and other applied research.
The Knights launched the campus with a $500 million gift in 2016 and later gave another $500 million to expand it. It now includes the Department of Bioengineering, graduate programs and research labs focused on areas including medical devices, biomaterials, neural engineering, synthetic biology and biomedical artificial intelligence.
The new engineering college will broaden that work beyond bioengineering. The $1 billion gift is expected to help fund faculty, academic programs and research, although the university has not yet announced details about the college’s degree offerings or timeline, according to Forbes.
The Knights’ previous donations have also helped expand the university’s science facilities. A second Knight Campus building opened in March, adding 185,000 square feet of research laboratories, teaching spaces and a makerspace for students.
"To make an audacious dream a reality requires more than a vivid imagination. It also requires the sort of opportunity that our great American universities, both public and private, have historically provided. This is no time to abandon them,” Phil Knight said in a statement included in Oregon’s news release. “Penny and I are grateful for the chance to invest in our most promising young people’s future in this important way.”
The latest Oregon donation comes a week after the couple announced they are giving $1.1 billion to Providence St. Vincent Medical Center and the Providence Heart Institute to establish Oregon’s first hospital dedicated to women’s health and expand cardiac care and patient support services.
