$100 million from Joyce Farmer and family sets a new record at university
Some campus traditions are carved in stone.
At Miami University, one of them is written in red brick, above the doors of Farmer Hall, and it has been renewed every decade or so for more than thirty years.
On Thursday, at his annual State of the University address in Oxford, Ohio, President Gregory Crawford renewed it again.
He announced that the Farmer Family Foundation will give up to $100 million to the Farmer School of Business over the next ten years.
It is the largest gift in Miami’s 217-year history and, by the university’s count, one of the three largest ever made to a public undergraduate business school in the United States.
It also carried Miami across the finish line of its $1 billion campaign, “For love. For honor. For those who will.”
At the center of the gift is Joyce Barnes Farmer, a foundation trustee and the matriarch of the family that built Cintas.
She came to Oxford in the 1950s to study elementary education, graduated in 1957, and married a business student from the class ahead of her named Dick Farmer.
Nearly seventy years later, she is still talking about the place the way alumni talk about home.
“Miami has provided so many incredible memories for our family, and we are so happy to continue to support the Farmer School of Business,” she said.
“From the wonderful faculty to the impressive and hard-working students, the Farmer School is truly one of the top business schools in the country. We take great pride in the innovation and talent that is associated with the Farmer School of Business.”
The structure of the gift says as much about the family as its size.
The first $55 million will arrive over the next three years.
Built into the commitment is a $25 million matching fund, under which the foundation will match new gifts of $25,000 or more dollar for dollar, up to $2.5 million from any single donor.
Miami must earn that match, and future funding will depend largely on the Farmer School continuing to meet key performance goals.
The terms of the remaining $45 million will be set later.
The university says it and the foundation have full confidence the school will meet the mark.
It is generosity with expectations attached, the way a founder might invest in a company he believes in.
The money is aimed squarely at students.
Dean Jenny Darroch describes a future in which every one of the school’s more than 5,000 students has a personalized career plan, built around their values, high-stakes real-world experiences, and the skills employers want right now.
The gift can pay for industry certifications, global experiential learning, mentorship, and training in emerging technologies.
It will also strengthen the school’s quantitative and technology teaching at a moment when artificial intelligence is reshaping where every career begins.
“Our job is not simply to introduce students to those tools but to develop leaders who know when to trust them, when to question them, and how to use them responsibly,” Darroch said.
“This investment allows us to embed data and tech-fluency into every corner of our student experience.”
She was careful to frame the gift as acceleration rather than reinvention.
“This gift isn’t about changing who we are; it’s about amplifying what we already do best,” she said.
“We have always been a school that prides itself on being market-responsive and student-focused. This incredible investment from the Farmer Family Foundation allows us to move at the pace of business so we can stay at the forefront of business education.”
That phrase, the pace of business, would have pleased the man whose name is on the building.
Richard T. “Dick” Farmer earned his business degree from Miami in 1956, served in the Marine Corps, and then went to work at his family’s Acme Uniform and Linen Company in Cincinnati, a twelve-person operation.
He saw that the workers of postwar America needed clean, professional uniforms, and in 1968 he founded the company that became Cintas, now the nation’s leading supplier of uniforms and workwear.
He led it for four decades, created an employee ownership plan so the people wearing the company’s colors could share in its success, and stepped down as chairman and chief executive in 2009.
Through all of it, Joyce was beside him.
Friends liked to tease Dick that she was the best decision he ever made.
He never argued.
In 1988, the couple and their three children turned a shared set of family values into the Farmer Family Foundation: care for one another and for those less fortunate, the worth of hard work, honesty and integrity, and a duty to make their community and country better.
It has always been a family enterprise in the fullest sense.
Today the trustee table includes Joyce; her son Scott Farmer, executive chairman of Cintas; and his wife, Mary; daughter Amy Farmer Joseph and her husband, George Joseph; son-in-law Robert Coletti; and a third generation that has already pulled up a chair.
The trustees serve without pay.
“The Farmer family has a long and treasured relationship with Miami University,” Scott Farmer said.
“Our parents were shaped by their time at Miami, and a love of the university was passed down to their three children. We are thrilled that the Farmer Family Foundation can ensure the Farmer School of Business continues to define excellence and meet the challenges of tomorrow by preparing the type of leaders the world needs.”
Robert Coletti put it more simply. “The Farmer Family Foundation is proud to be a part of continuing that momentum by investing in its students.”
Miami was the family’s first great canvas, and the record shows a relationship that has grown with each chapter.
In 1992, Dick and Joyce made the cornerstone gift to the business school that now bears his name. In 2005, a $30 million leadership gift from the foundation, $25 million of it for construction and $5 million for faculty, provided most of the funding for Farmer Hall, a red-brick Georgian building that became the first on campus to earn LEED certification.
In 2016, on the very day Crawford was inaugurated as Miami’s president, he surprised the audience by announcing $40 million more from Dick, Joyce and the foundation, then the largest gift in the university’s history.
“We have such wonderful memories here, Joyce and I, as do our children and grandchildren,” Dick said at the time.
Ten years later, the same president stood at the same university to announce a gift two and a half times larger.
Between the headline moments came quieter, steadier support: scholarships, advising, internship funding and faculty backing, year after year.
A few years ago, the foundation offered a $20 million dollar-for-dollar match to rally other donors behind the campaign.
It was nearly exhausted in about a year, helping the school raise almost $30 million in cash in a single fiscal year.
The new $25 million match is built on that proof.
The family has learned that its generosity is most powerful when it invites others to stand alongside it.
That instinct runs through the family’s giving far beyond Oxford.
Only weeks ago, the foundation committed $50 million to The Christ Hospital Health Network in Cincinnati, the largest gift in that hospital’s 137-year history, to modernize its Mount Auburn campus; it followed a $15 million gift for the hospital’s Heart and Vascular Institute just a year earlier.
A $60 million gift to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra is building The Farmer Music Center, a 20,000-seat amphitheater on the former Coney Island grounds whose net revenues will flow back into the orchestra’s education and neighborhood programs.
The family has given roughly $14 million to the University of Cincinnati’s Gardner Neuroscience Institute, including a fund that pays the full tuition of nursing graduates who commit to careers in neurology at UC Health.
At Cincinnati Children’s, it backed organoid medicine, the science of growing miniature human organs from stem cells, before most donors had heard of it.
It has given more than $25 million to Accelerate Great Schools to expand excellent schools for the city’s underserved children, supported inner-city Catholic schools since 1989, and, honoring Dick’s years in the Marines, helped build care for wounded veterans and a guest house for their families.
In a recent year, the foundation made more than 150 grants. The typical one was about $15,000, the kind of support that keeps a small neighborhood nonprofit’s lights on.
Seen against that record, the latest announcement felt less like a surprise than a culmination.
A woman who once walked Miami’s campus as a future teacher has spent a lifetime helping turn it into a place that teaches the next generation of business leaders.
In the years ahead, a first-generation student will land an internship that once seemed out of reach, a sophomore will earn a certification that sets her résumé apart, and a graduate will walk into a first job knowing exactly when to trust the machine and when to question it.
Most of them will never meet Joyce Farmer.
They will simply walk beneath her family’s name on the way to class, carrying forward what she and Dick began in Oxford nearly seventy years ago.