$311.9 million given to university in donor support, fueled by historic law school and neuroscience gifts
The University of Cincinnati and UC Health closed their 2025–26 fiscal year with the most generous 12 months of philanthropic support in the institution’s history, according to results released by the university, with donors contributing a combined $311,919,806 across the academic year that ran from July 2025 through June 2026.
The figure marks a roughly 36 percent jump over the previous fiscal year’s total of $228,479,079, itself a record at the time, underscoring a sustained surge in giving to the public research university and its affiliated health system in the years following the close of its $2.19 billion “Next, Now” capital campaign.
Two transformational commitments anchored the year’s totals and are now being formally reflected in the university’s annual accounting of philanthropic activity, even though both were publicly announced months earlier in the fiscal calendar.
The largest was a $43.2 million gift from the Klekamp family, a blended cash-and-estate commitment made in honor of Donald P. Klekamp, a 1957 graduate of the College of Law and retired founding partner of the Cincinnati firm Keating Muething & Klekamp.
The UC Board of Trustees approved the gift and an accompanying rededication of the school as the Donald P. Klekamp College of Law at a special meeting, calling it the largest single gift in the college’s nearly 200-year history.
The gift is being disbursed over time to strengthen four pillars of the college’s mission: a scholarship program aimed at preserving affordability, experiential learning initiatives including the Summer Public Interest Fellowship Program and an endowed professor of practice, student success measures such as bar exam advising, and an expanded Corporate Law Center anchored by a new endowed chair and continued funding for the Corporate Law Symposium and the Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinic.
In its fiscal-year report, the university noted a tangible early return on that investment: every Donald P. Klekamp College of Law student who applied for a fully funded Summer Public Interest Fellowship this year received one, a 30 percent increase in funded fellowship participation attributed directly to the family’s philanthropy.
The college’s dean, Haider Ala Hamoudi, has said the gift “does not simply add resources—it transforms what is possible,” enabling the school to compete for top students and elevate the Corporate Law Center into a nationally prominent program.
Donald Klekamp and his extended family, spanning children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, gathered on campus for a rededication ceremony at the college on May 15, a milestone UC President Neville G. Pinto called “a defining moment for the University of Cincinnati and our College of Law”.
The second marquee commitment came from the James J. and Joan A. Gardner Family Foundation, which pledged $20 million to the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute in an October 2025 announcement that the university described at the time as “transformative” and “extraordinary”.
The gift is intended to accelerate research into memory disorders, strengthen the institute’s learning health system, and support UC’s pursuit of designation as an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center from the National Institute on Aging.
The university tied the gift specifically to the newly launched, multidisciplinary Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases Research, or CANDR, describing the institute’s 2025–26 fundraising as itself record-breaking.
The Gardner family’s relationship with the institute dates to 2007, when Cintas executive James J. Gardner made an initial gift spurred by his wife Joan’s Parkinson’s disease diagnosis; the family’s cumulative giving to the center that now bears its name has surpassed $50 million, including a $14 million commitment in 2014 that helped build the institute’s current facility and a $3.8 million gift in 2019 for a Parkinson’s and dementia biomarker study.
Beyond those two headline commitments, the university’s fiscal-year disclosure detailed a broader roster of major gifts that collectively pushed the total past the $300 million threshold for the first time. George G. Bemis Jr., a 1964 graduate of the College of Medicine, left a $15 million bequest to support an endowed chair honoring his father, George Bemis Sr., and his friend, physician Thomas F. Boat.
The Alpaugh Foundation contributed a $10 million estate gift to the Alpaugh Family Economics Center, extending a family commitment that dates back to the center’s founding in 1976.
David F. Herche made a $4 million investment in the Men’s Basketball Excellence Fund, and the Bernard Osher Foundation gave $2.1 million toward the new UC Osher Wellness Suite and John & Carrie Hayden Community Learning Kitchen, part of the Osher Center for Integrative Health at UC. Physicians Henry A. and Amelia T. Nasrallah endowed a professorship in psychiatric neuroscience at the College of Medicine, and Fred and Johna Lucas, both physicians, established the Fred V. Lucas, MD Endowed Chair of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.
The university also reported that the College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services, the College of Medicine, the College of Nursing, the Donald P. Klekamp College of Law and the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute each posted their own record-breaking fundraising years.
Scholarship support totaled $40.4 million, with $20 million of that sum coming from alumni donors, and 205 new scholarship funds were created during the year.
The university logged 119 estate gifts worth a combined $57 million, while gifts under $25,000 — supporting causes ranging from general scholarships to the UC Student Emergency Fund and the Bearcats Pantry and Resource Center — added up to $23.1 million. In total, 32,800 donors made more than 45,000 gifts, including 15,830 alumni who contributed more than 25,000 distinct gifts.
Corporate partners also played a visible role: energy technology company SLB donated geosciences software to the College of Arts and Sciences, while Siemens gave College of Engineering and Applied Science students access to its EDA software platform.
University officials framed the results as evidence of sustained donor confidence following the close of the “Next, Now” campaign two years ago.
“This new record reflects the remarkable generosity of our donors,” said Rich Bundy, president of the UC Foundation.
“Their commitment empowers UC and UC Health to transform lives through student success, faculty excellence and groundbreaking advances in healthcare.” President Pinto called the year “a moment worthy of celebration,” adding that donor generosity is “creating new scholarships, expanding opportunities across our colleges, investing in distinguished faculty and strengthening the research and programs that will define UC’s future.”
UC Health president and chief executive Cory D. Shaw noted that this year’s giving was distinguished by its concentration in integrative health, neurological care and services for people with developmental disabilities, including community support that made possible a new home for the Timothy Freeman, MD, Center for Developmental Disabilities. Leigh Fox, chair of the UC Foundation’s Board of Trustees, credited fellow alumni for the milestone, saying their donations, “large and small, are supporting a bright future for the next generation of Bearcats.
Taken together, the fiscal-year figures suggest that the Klekamp and Gardner commitments, while announced separately months before the report’s release, are functioning as the twin pillars of a fundraising year that has reset expectations for what a mid-sized public research university with an affiliated academic health system can generate in a single 12-month cycle — and one that university leaders are already framing as a new floor rather than a ceiling for future giving.