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Nike's Phil Knight donates $400 million to Stanford scholars program
The name Phil Knight has always been synonymous with the University of Oregon, but the Nike co-founder's philanthropy is once again extending elsewhere in the Pac-12 thanks to a massive donation to Stanford University this week.
According to the New York Times, Knight pledged $400 million to Stanford's newly formed Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program on Monday. The initiative, which will officially be announced Wednesday, aims to "recruit graduate students around the globe to address society's most intractable problems, including poverty and climate change," according to the Times.
"This is using education to benefit mankind and I think it really could be transformative," Knight told the Times. "I jumped on it right away."
The program, named after Knight and outgoing Stanford president John L. Hennessy, has raised $750 million in funding overall and will go into effect in 2018, offering full tuition and board to 100 students, with two-thirds of those students coming to Stanford from outside the United States. According to the Times, students in the program will gain admission into one of seven Stanford graduate schools and will "commit to working on important issues in small, multidisciplinary teams."
"To say we can solve all the world's problems is naïve," Hennessy said, according to the Times. "To say we can educate people to make a significant difference in trying to solve those problems -- that's an achievable goal."
A Stanford business school graduate, Knight gave $105 million to the university's graduate school of business in 2006.
His donations to the Oregon athletic program also run well into the hundreds of millions, and just last year Knight, whose net worth is reportedly more than $25 billion, donated $500 million to Oregon Health and Sciences University to help fund an early cancer detection program at the school.
