COLUMBUS — Complete with triumphant music and sweeping green curtains, Ohio University officials announced Saturday that it will receive $105 million, the largest gift ever given to a higher education institution in Ohio.
The Osteopathic Heritage Foundations awarded the gift to OU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, bringing the total funds the college has received from the foundations to almost $123 million since 1999.
The $105 million gift is equal to about one-fourth of OU’s entire Athens campus budget, which totals about $398 million. It is also the fourth largest gift ever given to a medical school in America, according to OU’s research.
“This is going to transform the College of Osteopathic Medicine for perpetuity,” OU President Roderick McDavis said at the event Saturday. “It will lift the college to a level of being one of the very best medical schools in the United States, (and it will) lift the hopes of the entire university to be far greater than we are today.”
As a result of the gift, OU has renamed its college the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine.
“Named colleges are rare gifts in the realm of public higher education; they are also powerful gifts … just as the names Scripps and Russ have come to signify academic distinction in the realms of communication and engineering, and the recently named Patton College has come to signify distinction in education,” said Pam Benoit, OU’s executive vice president and provost.
The college has worked on what it is calling Vision 2020 for more than a year, and it recently presented this vision to the foundations, said Jack Brose, dean of OU’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. The foundations’ gift is based on this vision.
During the coming years, the college will use the gift to initiate a number of new programs outlined in the vision. The first initiatives the award will fund include a regional extension campus for the college in Columbus as well as diabetes and neuromuscular-skeletal centers in Athens.
“We had some idea, but when I saw the actual amount and knew it was really going to happen. It was very emotional,” Brose said. “I was bowled over.”
Brose added that he has known about the gift for some time.
Richard Vincent, president and CEO of the Osteopathic Heritage Foundations, formally announced the award during the Ohio Osteopathic Symposium at the Hilton Columbus at Easton Hotel.
The money will be given to the university in increments, likely during the next 15 or 16 years, as each project begins, Vincent said after the event. He added that OU should receive the first installment during this school year.
“We have never considered a grant or award of this magnitude, nor have we considered an award that will have the potential impact this one will have,” Vincent said in a video shown at the ceremony.
In addition to the medical centers and campus extension, the gift will help to create more scholarships for students entering the college, especially given what Brose predicted would be a shortage of physicians in under-served areas during the upcoming decades.
OU has the only osteopathic medicine college in Ohio — one of the main reasons the foundations are such a large benefactor, Vincent said.
During the past several years, the foundations also made large donations to help fund the opening of OU’s Academic and Research Center and the newly renovated Heritage Clinical Training and Assessment Center & Community Clinic.
“I think this is an indication of faith in the college by the foundations, and we fully intend to live up to that,” Brose said.
— Pat Holmes contributed to this report.
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