$20 million latest gift from Dwight and Martha Schar, largest in university’s history, transforms its residence halls and raises their philanthropic giving above $220 million

On Friday afternoon, Oct. 2, students, faculty, and neighbors will gather outside Amstutz Hall at Ashland University to cut a ribbon and to thank the couple who paid for what they’ll be looking at.

The nine-story hall now has a glass façade that runs the full height of the building and fills open study lounges with daylight on every floor. The ceremony will also dedicate Schar Plaza at the hall’s main entrance, named for Dwight and Martha Schar.

Their $20 million gift paid for the renovation and is the largest in the university’s history.

The gift covered a complete renovation of Amstutz Hall, four-story Jacobs Hall, and the first floor of Andrews Hall. The construction was completed in five months. For the first time, the three halls have air conditioning and private pod-style bathrooms. The team redid lobbies and rooms with new flooring, LED lighting, and furniture. For students who used to come back in late August to hot rooms and shared bathrooms, the change is easy to feel. For the university, it is a bet that where students live shapes how they learn, meet friends, and decide to stay.

“We are looking forward to publicly recognizing Dwight and Martha Schar for their longtime commitment to Ashland University,” said President Jon Parrish Peede. “The Schars’ most recent gift has allowed us to offer an enhanced residential experience for many of our current students as well as for future generations.”

With this gift, the Schars have now given Ashland $60 million over more than four decades, and their names are all over the campus. The Dwight Schar College of Education opened after a $5 million gift in 2006, and the Dwight Schar Athletic Complex followed in 2010. The Dwight Schar College of Nursing and Health Sciences was established in 2012. Later gifts supported the Physician Assistant Studies program in 2021, a renovation of Clayton Hall in 2022, the Lyceum Café, and a campus beautification program in 2023. Their giving now reaches almost every part of student life, from where students sleep and study to where they train, eat, and gather.

The Schars’ loyalty to Ashland goes back to Dwight Schar’s own start. He grew up in Wayne County, Ohio, graduated from Norwayne High School, and earned an education degree from Ashland in 1964. He began his career as a junior high school teacher and sold houses on weekends. The weekend job turned into a career. He went into real estate full-time in 1968 at Ryan Homes and rose to run its Mid-Atlantic homebuilding operations. In 1980, he founded Northern Virginia Land and Homes Co., which grew into NVR, Inc. NVR is now one of the country’s largest homebuilders, operating under the Ryan Homes, NVHomes, and Heartland Homes brands.

He served as chief executive until 2005 and as executive chairman until he retired from the board in 2022, at age 80.

The path to that success was not smooth. NVR lost $261 million in 1990 when interest rates rose and home sales fell, and it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1992.

It emerged from bankruptcy in 1993. That same year, the Schars made their first major gift to Inova Health System in Northern Virginia, their adopted home. “At that point in my career, I was really broke, but I was drawn to help Inova,” Schar has said. He credits the example of the late Northern Virginia developer Milt Peterson and a friendship with longtime Inova chief executive J. Knox Singleton.

Health care has become the Schars’ largest cause, and the reasons are personal. His mother raised six children alone and died of cancer at 58, at a time when, as he has said, good medical care was hard for his family to reach. “Health care is No. 1 in my books; there’s nothing more important you can offer the community,” he has said.

When ExxonMobil’s 117-acre campus in Merrifield became available, Schar helped Inova secure it for a new cancer and research center, offering his real estate experience and his money. In 2015, the couple gave $50 million to establish the Inova Schar Cancer Institute, which opened in 2019. There, patients are seen by a full team of specialists, supported by psychosocial care and an arts-and-healing program, all under one roof.

In May 2023, the Schars gave $75 million to Inova’s heart and vascular programs, now the Inova Schar Heart and Vascular Institute. It was the largest gift in Inova’s history and one of the largest ever made for heart health in the United States. Martha Schar had recently had heart valve replacement surgery.

The couple made the gift a challenge, asking the community to match it within a year. The community gave more than was asked, raising well over $150 million in total.

Their giving to Inova since 1993 now exceeds $126 million. The couple has said the details of patient care matter to them too. Schar is known to be proud of the free valet parking at both institutes so that no patient in treatment has to walk blocks from a parking spot.

Education is the Schars’ second major cause, and it also reflects their family. Their sons, Spencer and Stuart, attended Elon University in North Carolina. The couple’s $12 million gift there in 2014 was, at the time, the largest in Elon’s history. In 2016, Schar pledged $10 million to George Mason University, and its policy school was renamed the Schar School of Policy and Government.

He has also endowed a chair at Mason and supported its regional economic research. Schar has spoken frankly about the cost of college: “The cost of higher education is ridiculous now; only the affluent can afford to make that kind of investment. We have to figure out alternative ways to provide quality, affordable education.”

Across their giving, the Schars have focused on three areas: health, children, and education.

They give where they have lived and learned. They have backed hospitals in the region where they built their business and campuses tied to their family, including the small Ohio university where a young education major once planned a life in the classroom.

On Friday, when the ribbon is cut in front of Amstutz Hall, that graduate will be honored by his alma mater once again, alongside the wife who has shared in all of it.