USC accepts $260 million donation

USC will receive a $260 million gift from the Lord Foundation of California, the University announced Wednesday. The gift ranks as the 34th largest donation to an institute of higher education since 1967, according to a list published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

The Lord Foundation of California is a nonprofit organization established to support education and research through donations to USC. The foundation is one of four founded by Thomas Lord, the former president of manufacturing company LORD Corporation. The other three Lord Foundations support the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University and the Cleveland Clinic.

The sale of LORD Corporation in April left sales totaling over $1 billion, which will be divided equally among the four foundations. 

“This gift is such a large gift with so much flexibility that I really see it as a great responsibility to do the right thing, to take the time that it takes to determine how best to use this so that we are really setting up effects that are going to last for the next decade or two,” President Carol Folt told the Daily Trojan.

The University first learned of the possibility of the gift about a month ago, but the donation was only confirmed in the last week and a half, Folt said. She said the University hasn’t determined how the donation will be distributed to specific programs and departments yet, but she called the gift a “game-changer” for USC.

Folt said the foundation has donated annually since the 1980s.

“We’ve used [the donations] every year to help teaching and research programs in engineering and in the business school,” Folt said. “It’s already had a very big impact here, and now we have a chance to say ‘What did we achieve, and how can we expand that and just do the marvelous?’”

In an interview with USC News, Provost Charles Zukoski called the donation “a provost’s dream,” saying that it would accelerate the growth of the University’s research programs.

“The flexibility and scale of this gift allows us to build much more rapidly than normally possible upon cross-university strengths,” Zukoski said. 

Folt said the donation will undergo approvals and other administrative processes over the next year, after which the University will begin to allocate the funds across its schools. The gift’s disbursement will extend across multiple disciplines and emphasize development in areas relevant to the future, including artificial intelligence, analytics and sustainability, Folt said.

“I think it will allow us to address these major societal issues in a way that will really help our University help set a course for us for decades to come,” Folt said.