$25 million from Robert and Janice McNair helps lift university to a record $357.6 million year of giving
University of South Carolina donors just did something remarkable: they gave more money to the school in one year than ever before, and it wasn’t close.
The system pulled in $357.6 million in private support this past fiscal year, blowing past its previous record of $259.7 million by nearly $100 million.
More than 48,000 people opened their wallets for USC, and roughly 16,000 of them were giving to the university for the very first time — proof that Gamecock generosity is only gathering momentum.
One of the gifts behind that banner year came from an old friend of the university: the Robert and Janice McNair Foundation, which chipped in $25 million this year alone.
For USC, it’s the latest installment in a friendship with the McNair family that now spans nearly thirty years, and it’s a good excuse to tell their story.
Bob McNair didn’t start out a billionaire.
He spent his 20s and 30s bouncing between sales jobs and business ideas that didn’t quite take off. “Many people say I was an overnight success, and I was, after 20 years of struggling,” he liked to joke.
Eventually he built Cogen Technologies into the largest privately owned cogeneration company on the planet, sold it to Enron for $1.5 billion in 1999, and turned right around and used the money to buy Houston an NFL team.
The Texans took the field for the first time in 2002, and a city that had lost its old franchise had football again.
What Bob and his wife, Janice, did next is really the fun part of this story.
Rather than sit on the fortune, the two of them poured more than half a billion dollars into causes close to their hearts — mainly education and medical research — and USC got in early.
Bob graduated from the school in 1958, and in 1998 he and Janice put up $20 million to start the McNair Scholars program, a scholarship for top out-of-state students in the Honors College.
They kept coming back: $10 million more in 2008, $8 million in 2016 to launch an entrepreneurship institute, $18 million in 2019 to sweeten the scholarships, and now $25 million this year, pushing their lifetime giving to the university past $81 million.
“Those who demonstrate outstanding academic achievements with a commitment to service and leadership represent our future,” the couple once said. “We are delighted to provide scholarships to these deserving students.”
Columbia wasn’t their only stop.
Back in Houston, the McNairs gave $100 million to Baylor College of Medicine in 2007 to fund research into cancer, diabetes and the brain, a gift so large Baylor named its campus after them.
They spread support to Rice University, MD Anderson, Texas Children’s Hospital and beyond, and even set up a scholarship foundation for graduates of Bob’s old high school back in North Carolina, which has quietly handed out nearly $9 million to help local kids get to college.
Janice was every bit the equal partner in that generosity, not just a name on a foundation letterhead. A Columbia College grad and proud South Carolinian, she eventually took the reins of the Texans herself before handing them to her son, Cal, and she stayed devoted to the causes she and Bob built together for the rest of her life.
Their family has carried that spirit forward, and this year’s gift shows the McNair name still means business at USC — a decades-long partnership that keeps opening doors for students who might never have set foot on campus otherwise.
Add it all up, and USC’s record year tells a bigger story than one really good number. It’s thousands of donors, new and longtime alike, betting on the same thing the McNairs bet on nearly thirty years ago: that a scholarship, a building, or a well-timed gift can change where a student’s life goes next.