It seems there’s no better way for Indiana University to thank donors for gifts than by putting their names on something their money will support.
Over the past two years, donations have resulted in the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, the Ken and Audrey Beckley Studio, the Tavis Smiley Scholarships, the Knauss Family Scholarship, the Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology, Baier Hall and the Jerome Hall Law Library, just to name a few. The total sum of those donations was about $20 million more than the $23 million E.W. Kelley paid to become the namesake of IU’s Kelley School of Business in 1997.
When Kelley, the chairman of Steak ’n Shake, died six years later at the age of 86, he was still the only individual with his name attached to a school at IU. That would soon change.
In 2005, the IU School of Music was renamed the IU Jacobs School of Music after Barbara Jacobs donated $40.6 million to the school in honor of her late husband, real estate developer David H. Jacobs. Three years after that, a $35 million donation got attorney and entrepreneur Michael Maurer’s name on the sign in front of what was then the IU School of Law.
Donations and subsequent naming accelerated in the fall of 2015 after the announcement of IU’s bicentennial campaign, an effort to raise $2.5 billion by the university’s 200th birthday in 2020. In less than two weeks, IU announced more than $40 million in donations.
David Henry Jacobs, IU alumnus and son of Barbara and David H. Jacobs, helped kick off the campaign with a $20 million gift to the school that already bears his surname. An $8 million gift from cloud computing company ServiceNow founder Fred Luddy got his name on the IU School of Informatics and Computing’s newest building, which is being constructed along Woodlawn Avenue.
A $20 million gift from Conrad T. Prebys got the president of Progress Construction Management’s name on a career services center inside the Kelley School’s Hodge Hall Undergraduate Center. The center was named after alumnus James R. Hodge, who donated $15 million.