Phil Knight, one of the University’s most prominent alumni and most generous donors, reached outside the state of Oregon on Tuesday and gave his biggest monetary donation to date – $105 million – to Stanford University, a university to which he has given donations frequently.
Knight’s Stanford donation was worth more than all of his previous reported donations to the University of Oregon combined. Over the years Knight has donated at least $60 million to the University – and likely more that has gone unnoticed – for a multitude of projects, including roughly $35 million for the renovation of Autzen Stadium in 2001, renovations to the Knight Library in 1994 and the construction of the William Knight Law Center in 1996.
Sixty-eight-year-old Knight, Nike, Inc. Chairman and company co-founder, pledged the money to aid in the construction of a $275 million complex to house Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Knight attended Stanford graduate school where he earned his Masters of Business Administration and wrote his thesis on overcoming Germany’s dominance on the shoe industry by manufacturing high-quality shoes in Japan and selling them in the U.S. at low prices.
Knight, a Portland-native, has been identified as a key backer of the University’s $160 million, 12,500 seat basketball arena, but he has yet to publicly announce any actual donations.
The University has had difficulty securing donors to fund the proposed arena’s construction, which is meant to be funded entirely by private donations. Development, however, had recently picked up since being put on hold in 2004, when conceptual designs were created in late 2005 and the University purchased the Williams’ Bakery lot located one block east of campus on Franklin Boulevard to house the arena.
Knight expressed concerns regarding the proposed arena last month after the recent departure of Jim Bartko to the University of California at Berkeley. Bartko had previously served as a liaison between Knight and the University’s athletic department.
Knight was quoted by Register-Guard columnist Ron Bellamy on July 12 as saying Bartko’s departure “doesn’t help my involvement with the basketball arena,” but that he will still work with the University and the athletic department.
“At the end of the day, you basically want to have your charitable contributions go where they’ll be used well, and there are a couple of clouds on that,” Knight told the Register-Guard.
In an Aug. 2 column, Oregonian sports writer John Canzano labeled Knight’s Stanford donation as a “slap” to the University of Oregon and to the basketball arena project because Knight is concerned with how development of the arena is unfolding and how his charitable contributions would be used.
Knight is further intertwined with the project because his primary architect, University alumnus Bob Thompson, is working as one of the two architects for the arena. Dan Williams, special assistant to the president/athletics, told the Emerald in April 2005 that “A lot of our conversations about the arena have been with Phil Knight over the years, and (Thompson) has been Phil’s preferred architect. So on the assumption that the Knights will be involved in that, they would prefer to use Thompson. … But we’re not using him to try to induce (donations).”
Dave Williford, assistant athletic director for media services, said he sees Knight’s donation to Stanford as entirely unrelated to the University’s basketball arena, and doesn’t see any major setbacks in the project’s development.
When asked whether Knight’s donation was any kind of signal of his possible waning interest in the arena, he said “I have no idea. I don’t think anybody does. We view this (donation) that it doesn’t even involve the University of Oregon.”
University President Dave Frohnmayer released a statement supporting Knight’s donation to Stanford, saying Knight “told us earlier of his decision to give this extraordinary gift to our sister institution. We are enormously grateful for his longtime allegiance to the two institutions he credits with changing his life.”
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