As federal cuts loom, Virginia universities redouble fundraising

This is an era when individual philanthropists are needed, says Dr. Todd Stravitz, the retired liver surgeon who has donated more than $150 million to Virginia Commonwealth University and William & Mary over the past three years.

He and many others who make major donations or solicit them on behalf of universities and nonprofit organizations are fully aware of the current national situation. Colleges are facing cuts in federal funding — totaling hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in some cases — and that creates more pressure to seek funds from private donors, who already carry considerable weight at higher education institutions.

“I don’t know how long this push to minimize the contribution of scientific research and the way human beings are going to interact with Earth and everything that lives on Earth” will continue, Stravitz says. “The people who are degrading this and our NIH-funded researchers, for instance, I understand where they’re coming from. They’re trying to shrink big government and things like that, but this isn’t the way to do it, in my opinion. And so, I think that VIMS and VCU are probably going to rely more on foundation giving.”

In February, Stravitz and his family’s philanthropic organization, the Brunckhorst Foundation, made a $50 million donation to W&M’s Virginia Institute for Marine Science (VIMS) and the Batten School of Coastal & Marine Sciences, creating a full-tuition scholarship fund for students in those programs. Stravitz says he was inspired by Hampton Roads philanthropist Jane Batten‘s record-breaking gift to W&M and knew the university was seeking more funding to sustain its work in climate change research and coastal resilience.

In 2022, Stravitz made headlines for his $104 million donation to support liver research at VCU, establishing the Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health. A 1982 W&M alumnus who was medical director of VCU Health’s Hume-Lee Transplant Center, he is an heir to the Boar’s Head Provisions Co. fortune through his mother, the late Barbara Brunckhorst. The Brunckhorst Foundation, Stravitz says, has long supported programs focused on environmental sustainability, one of his mother’s primary interests.

In July 2024, Batten gave $100 million to establish the Batten School and expand VIMS, including creating the state’s first undergraduate degree program in coastal and marine sciences.

In an April email answering questions about her donation, Batten wrote that the school named after her family “promises to unleash an army of young environmentalists to lead the battle in their communities, their professions, in the world at large to save our planet from the lethal effects of a changing climate.”

Batten and her family, who have made eight- and nine-figure gifts to other Virginia universities, derived their fortune from the late Frank Batten Sr., who co-founded The Weather Channel and sold it to NBC Universal and two private equity firms in 2008 for nearly $3.5 billion, and served on the William & Mary Board of Visitors. The family owned TeleCable, Landmark Communications and The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press newspapers, among other media properties.

Batten says that her family is “committed to the support of environmental education,” and that the university’s “location at the center of a geographical region of the United States at high risk made it an obvious choice for an investment in an undergraduate degree in marine science, the first in Virginia.”

Record-breaking year

While he recognizes the challenges facing his office and its counterparts at universities across the nation with federal funding in jeopardy, William & Mary’s senior vice president of university advancement, Matthew Lambert, is also proud of the series of blockbuster donation announcements William & Mary has made over the past year.

In addition to Batten’s $100 million gift, which marks the university’s largest ever philanthropic gift, and Stravitz’s $50 million donation, which is the largest scholarship- specific fund in William & Mary history, William & Mary also received a $30 million anonymous donation from an alumna in March 2024 to renovate and rename a building in honor of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, the university’s chancellor. This April, alums Rob and Jean Berger Estes made a $15 million donation to launch the Estes Center for Excellence in Accounting.

Rob Estes, chairman and CEO of Richmond trucking giant Estes Express Lines, happens to live near Stravitz on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, though the two didn’t discuss their donations ahead of time, Stravitz says. Typically, major donors work closely with a small group of university advancement and administrative staff, keeping their cards close to the vest until announcement time. It can take multiple years to hash out plans for a major gift.

Stravitz began discussing his donation to VIMS with President Katherine Rowe, and Derek Aday, VIMS’ dean and director, not too long after Aday joined the university in 2021.

“The first time I went to VIMS several years ago, Derek was pretty much new on the job,” Stravitz says, “but you could tell that this guy totally had his act together and had a plan. We started talking, and I guess it took about three years or so to assemble what we’ve ended up with.”

Even though William & Mary is easy to work with and is an institution with deep ties to the nation’s history and an impressive slate of alums, it hasn’t always succeeded in past years at landing big donations.

“For reasons I don’t understand, they hadn’t received a lot of large gifts,” Stravitz says. “William & Mary’s received a lot of really big gifts in the last year, which is just wonderful. I think Jane Batten has a lot to do with that, and she certainly made me realize that this was a good investment.”

Despite his family foundation’s major gifts to VCU and William & Mary, Stravitz points out that the Brunckhorst Foundation has a wide-ranging scope, contributing to more than 60 organizations nationwide. He took a leadership role in the foundation in about 2016, he says, as his mother was aging and his career in medicine was winding down.

“It has been a tremendous joy,” Stravitz says. “I get a lot out of it. I somehow have gotten thrust into a position where I have to be creative about giving the money away and make people happy. I think taking a young person and promoting interest in research, whether it’s environmental or medical research, and making it easier for them to achieve their goals … is a very good strategy.”

Private vs. public sector

Lambert says that Rowe, who became William & Mary’s president in 2018, has created a “vision where William & Mary is uniquely positioned to be a force not just for good in our local Hampton Roads area or in the commonwealth, but for the country and the world.”

That appeals to major donors who “generally want to add to the margin of excellence [and] enable transformation and change,” he says. “We very rarely are going to donors and asking them to help us solve a crisis, although we do on occasion.”

Although many universities are taking steps to comply with the Trump White House’s executive orders — particularly in dissolving diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices — to protect federal funding, most expect to lose grants now or in the future as the administration cuts budgets for public health, environmental protection and international aid. Many other nonprofit institutions that receive federal grants are feeling the same pinch.

Designated an R1 research university by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, William & Mary processed more than $81 million in research spending in fiscal 2023 that was sponsored by grants. According to the university’s updated federal guidelines webpage, “a significant portion of this amount” could be impacted by changes in federal policy, and it is creating plans for scenarios in which it loses up to $70 million in annual revenue.

Stravitz anticipates people in the future looking back at this period in U.S. history — “where the federal government is trying to dismantle itself” and institute deep cuts — will “realize that we made a lot of mistakes, and that was not the way to make government smaller.”

The Batten School and VIMS have approximately $100 million in active research grants from federal agencies, creating about half of its operating budget, William & Mary says. In addition to working with Virginia’s congressional delegation “to ensure that decision makers understand the value of our nonpartisan science,” the university has “developed a gap fund to provide grants and loans to principal investigators who otherwise would need to pause or terminate ongoing work.”

Right now, with some of the Trump administration’s proposed funding cuts going through the court system, universities don’t have solid answers about how their budgets will be impacted, although most public research universities expect significant federal funding cuts.

In response, some of the nation’s largest philanthropic foundations — among them the Marguerite Casey Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the MacArthur Foundation — have committed hundreds of millions to make up some of the government funding gaps, but nowhere near the billions that some large universities receive annually.

In an April 28 NPR interview, New York University finance professor Sabrina Howell noted, “No private company would take on [research] on their own because it’s really expensive… only government can fund that kind of work.”

On the higher education side of the ledger, philanthropic funding is typically tied to specific projects, meaning that institutions can’t simply shift money to a program that is suddenly unfunded. Still, donors and advancement offices at universities are doing what they can to keep projects running and address new areas of research. So, the trend of seeking out ever-bigger individual donations continues.

Over the past year, William & Mary was not the only big winner in philanthropic announcements among Virginia colleges and universities.

In May 2024, Hampden-Sydney College and Shenandoah University each received $20 million donations, among the largest ever made to their institutions. Richmond’s Endeavour Legacy Foundation pledged its gift toward renovating Hampden-Sydney’s science center to an academic center housing two departments, and Wilbur and Clare Dove’s donation will help SU build a performing and visual arts center on its Winchester campus.

The University of Virginia’s College at Wise also received its largest ever donation last year, $11.2 million, from The Bill Gatton Foundation, creating six endowed funds for scholarships and capital construction.

Lambert says that getting the message out that William & Mary is a good investment to major donors — as well as to smaller donors who can combine forces to make a significant impact — is vital for the university’s future.

And that’s true across the board for higher education, he notes: “We’ve always as a country prioritized education, and when you look at the colleges and universities in the United States, that’s still the case today, but we clearly as a sector need to do a better job of [teaching] those that are in positions of leadership in the country, as well as our fellow citizens, about the impact that our colleges and universities have on the economy, the impact they have on our workforce [and] the impact they have on our democracy.”

This story has been corrected since publication.