Rice University just received the largest donation in the university’s history.
Venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife, Ann, both Rice bachelor’s and master’s degree holders, donated $50 million to the private university through their family’s foundation. The university will use the donation to start the Doerr Institute for New Leaders, which will cater to entrepreneurial students and students interested in improving their global leadership skills.
One of the program’s cornerstones will be a focus on increasing diversity and cultural inclusion. The program’s graduates will be trained to be global entrepreneurial leaders.
After the first class graduates from the Doerr Institute, the timeline of which has not been specified, university officials will survey graduates and keep tabs on their professional progress.
Tom Kolditz, director of the leadership development program at the Yale University School of Management, will direct the program.
The program, Kolditz said, will emphasize technology in two different forms: preexisting technologies and ones that are designed by the program’s students. Kloditz also said that the program will have a heavy focus on advisory support so students can work with professionals who will coach them in their leadership roles.
An understanding of international communication and leadership seems to be a recurring thing in the Doerr’s investments. The couple’s last major investment in Rice came in 2008, when they donated $15 million to Center for Engineering Leadership. The program has graduated members of Engineers Without Borders who have done work in Honduras and Nicaragua.
Rice’s international influence works both ways. The university has seen a major increase in international students — 10 percent of the class of 2018 is made up of international students. In an interview with the HBJ in February, Rice’s President David Leebron said the push for international students is “two-fold,” and that he wants his students to “have an international, global education … so when (students) sit down and have lunch with 10 people, one of those people is going to be a foreign student.”
It’s been a week of bold announcements from the university, which signed an agreement May 13 with Baylor University to increase collaborations, including plans to make each university’s graduate courses available to grad students enrolled at either university.
John Doerr, a venture capitalist based in California, has made headlines in the past few months for his involvement in a gender discrimination trial against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the firm where Doerr has worked for almost 35 years. Doerr serves on the boards of Google and Zynga, and was appointed by President Obama to the USA Economic Recovery Act Board in 2009.