'Transformational' Gift Is a Record for Black Colleges

A billionaire couple is giving $100 million to Atlanta's Spelman College, which the women's school says is the largest-ever single donation to a historically Black college or university. The donation was announced Thursday by Ronda Stryker and her husband, William Johnston, the AP reports. She is the billionaire granddaughter of the founder of medical device maker Stryker Corp., and he is the chairman of money management firm Greenleaf Trust. They live in Michigan. Spelman said it would use $75 million to endow scholarships. The rest of the money will be used for other purposes, including developing an academic focus on public policy and democracy, and improving student housing, a sore point in recent years among Spelman students.

"It's a transformational gift to any institution, period," trustee Lovette Russell said. HBCUs have small endowments compared with other colleges but have seen an increase in donations since the racial justice protests spurred by the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota. Spelman, which has about 2,400 students, has been relatively well-funded, though, reporting an endowment of $571 million in 2021. It's one of only two historically Black women's colleges and part of the Atlanta University Center, a consortium of four historically Black schools.

"I think it says that it's worth investing in HBCUs more broadly, schools that have been far too underinvested in," Spelman College President Helene Gayle told CBS News. Stryker and Johnston gave Spelman $30 million in 2018. They also gave $100 million in 2011 to create the Homer Stryker medical school at Western Michigan University. The Spelman donation comes a week after the United Negro College Fund announced a donation of $100 million from the Lilly Endowment Inc. That gift will go toward a pooled endowment for the 37 historically Black colleges and universities that form UNCF's membership, including Spelman, with the goal of boosting the schools' long-term financial stability. The fund is trying to raise $370 million for a shared endowment.

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