Phil Knight Backs New Engineering College for Student Entrepreneurs
Billionaire Phil Knight and his wife Penny have made the largest single donation ever to a public university to establish a new engineering college focused on student entrepreneurship.
Billionaire entrepreneur Phil Knight and his wife Penny have made the largest single donation ever to a public university, establishing the Knight College of Engineering at the University of Oregon. The new college aims to combine technical training, entrepreneurship, and startup support to accelerate the transition of university discoveries into the marketplace.
The donation, the largest ever to a public university, will be housed within the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, established by the Knight family in 2016. Bob Guldberg, executive director of the Knight Campus, stated the campus's mission is to speed up innovation and facilitate the efficient transfer of discoveries from labs to society.
The new college will enable "a doubling down on our innovation programming and incubator space," Guldberg said. He emphasized that the college will serve as an anchor point, attracting talented students to participate in all campus programs. The University of Oregon already offers an undergraduate minor in engineering, with full undergraduate majors anticipated within the next five years.
Guldberg himself took on the executive director role at the Knight Campus due to his background as a serial entrepreneur. He had witnessed firsthand the challenges of starting a new company immediately after university. "The opportunity to do something from scratch, design it from scratch, with resources from someone that has such a legacy of innovation, it was just an opportunity I couldn’t turn down," he stated.