USC received a $260-million gift from the LORD Foundation of California Wednesday to fund research and teaching.
The LORD foundation is divesting the funds it received from the recent sale of the LORD corporation based in North Carolina. The donation is one of the largest in American higher education history and the gift is expected to be distributed to USC in 2020 following legal approval.
The university is one of four recipients of the recent sale. The Cleveland Clinic, Duke University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have also received equal amounts from nearly $1 billion of the proceeds from The LORD foundation.
USC President Carol Folt told Annenberg Media that the donation is an opportunity to boost important projects across all the schools at USC.
“It’s very substantial and so it gives us the chance to do something very important and so we are going to take our time to figure out the very best way to use it,” Folt said. “I truly believe this is going to be one of the wonderful, cross-institutional initiatives that may have a very strong technological or scientific core.”
A variety of research and teaching initiatives have been funded by the foundation since 1980, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday. Some of these include the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program and the USC Marshall School of Business social enterprise lab.
USC Provost Charles F. Zukoski called the gift a “provost’s dream” and looks forward to how it will propel the university in its research.
“This gift allows us to build much more rapidly than normally possible upon cross-university strengths in areas such as artificial intelligence, big data and analytics, and to support our faculty as they leapfrog into emerging areas of research and teaching that advance the public good,” Zukoski said.
While the donation is very helpful, it is going to be challenging to decide which initiatives and projects get a piece of the funding, Folt said.
“We need many, many things. This is not going to be the answer for everything we need which doesn’t mean that other things we need won’t be a part of other focal initiatives,” she said. “But this is going to have to lead in a very strategic way, lead us forward and in the area we eventually pick.”
Hugh Lord founded the corporation in 1924 and his son established five LORD foundations in 1982, one of which supports USC. The corporation was a private global company that gave its attention to noise and vibration control products, electric-mechanical innovations, automotive and aerospace applications, and chemical products. With its unique capital structure, it exceeded $1 billion in sales just in the 2018 fiscal year alone.