Andrew Rizzo American billionaires, take note. Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, have cut a check worth $1 billion to his alma mater, the University of Oregon, described by the school as the largest gift ever given to a comprehensive public university. The money will establish the Knight College of Engineering at the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, itself the product of $500 million gifts from the Knights in 2016 and 2021.
As big a landmark as this is, large-scale philanthropy is nothing new for Knight. The Nike co-founder, worth an estimated $25 billion, has directed much of his wealth toward education and medicine in his home state, including several enormous checks in the last couple of years alone.
Last year, the Knights pledged $2 billion to Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute, the largest commitment ever made to a U.S. academic health center. More recently, the couple pledged $1.1 billion to Providence St. Vincent Medical Center and the Providence Heart Institute, the goal being to build Oregon’s first dedicated women’s health hospital and expand cardiovascular care. And then there are initiatives like the Nike Community Impact Fund, N7, and the Doernbecher Freestyle program, not personal philanthropic endeavors for Knight, but all products of the sports empire he built.
The choice to fund an engineering school might seem disconnected from Knight’s background in sports, but it isn’t. Employers across several sectors, including biotechnology, AI, life sciences, and yes, sports performance, consistently name engineering talent as one of their most critical needs. Oregon alone expects roughly 2,500 engineering job openings a year, and employers say those are among the hardest roles in the state to fill.
The new college intends to educate engineers and applied scientists in bioengineering and other high-demand disciplines, attract faculty and researchers, and accelerate the university’s ability to move discoveries out of the laboratory and into products, therapies, technologies, and companies. One of those companies might just be the next Nike.
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