Sneaker billionaire behind the biggest university gift in US history gives his alma mater $1B

Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, have pledged US$1 billion to the University of Oregon to create an engineering college, the largest known gift to a U.S. public flagship university.

The university announced the gift on Sept. 23. Paid over 10 years, it will cover a new building on the Knight Campus in Eugene, faculty hiring and the college's running costs in perpetuity, Knight Campus executive director Robert Guldberg told reporters that day, local news site Lookout Eugene-Springfield reported.

The college will train engineers and applied scientists in bioengineering and other high-demand fields, recruit leading researchers and shorten the path from lab discoveries to marketable products, the university said.

The university currently offers only engineering minors and graduate programs. Officials told The New York Times that building a full undergraduate program will take about a decade.

Guldberg said the Knight Campus expects its faculty to grow from 17 to 42 and its roughly 500 students to more than double.

University President Karl Scholz told The New York Times the gift was tremendous news at a time when "we're all feeling a little bit under siege."

A view of the University of Oregon campus in Eugene, Oregon. Photo courtesy of the university

The pledge lands as the university prepares to cut about $65 million from its budget over the coming years, largely because fewer out-of-state students, who pay far higher tuition than Oregon residents, are enrolling, public radio station KLCC reported.

In a May campus message, Scholz traced the decline to factors ranging from demographic shifts and economic uncertainty to a political environment that is weighing on international enrollment.

In his Sept. 23 message announcing the gift, he noted that the money is earmarked for engineering and does not resolve the university's structural deficit.

Knight, 88, graduated from the university in 1959. The pledge brings his family's known giving to the school to more than $2 billion, The New York Times reported.

That total includes two $500 million gifts, in 2016 and 2021, that built and expanded the Knight Campus.

In a statement released by the university, Knight said he and Penny were "grateful for the chance to invest in our most promising young people's future."

Among the largest gifts to U.S. public universities before this one were an anonymous $550 million gift to Western Michigan University in 2021 and $500 million from the Simons Foundation to Stony Brook University in 2023, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education's list of major gifts.

The Knights' own $2 billion pledge in 2025 to the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University, Oregon's public academic health center, remains the largest gift ever made to an American university. It surpassed Michael Bloomberg's $1.8 billion gift to Johns Hopkins University in 2018.