$43.2 million: Donald Klekamp’s recent gift to law school lifts his family’s giving to university past $115 million
The University of Cincinnati and UC Health just closed out the most generous fiscal year in their history, pulling in $312 million in donor support between July 2025 and June 2026 — a nearly 36 percent jump over the previous record of $228.5 million and the first time the two have crossed $300 million in a single year. It comes two years after UC wrapped its $2.19 billion “Next, Now” campaign, and officials say the momentum from that decade-long push hasn’t faded so much as accelerated.
“This new record reflects the remarkable generosity of our donors,” said UC Foundation President Rich Bundy.
“Their commitment empowers UC and UC Health to transform lives through student success, faculty excellence, and groundbreaking advances in healthcare.”
Nothing defined the year quite like the $43.2 million gift from the family of Donald P. Klekamp, a 1957 UC law graduate and retired founding partner of Cincinnati firm Keating Muething & Klekamp.
It’s the largest single gift in the College of Law’s nearly 200-year history, and the school has been rededicated in his honor as the Donald P. Klekamp College of Law.
“The remarkable generosity of the Klekamp family pays tribute to Donald Klekamp’s legacy while enhancing our capacity to train the future generation of skilled legal professionals,” UC President Neville G. Pinto said.
Klekamp, now in his 90s and still active at the firm he helped build into roughly 140 lawyers and 240 staff, was hired in 1959 by founders Charles Keating and John Muething; the firm is known today as KMK Law.
He was also an original shareholder and director of Cintas Corporation, serving on its board until he turned 70.
His giving to UC goes back three decades—an endowed law professorship in 1995, then funding that relocated the Legal Aid Society into the Donald P. Klekamp Community Law Center—and this new gift is really the capstone of that relationship. It’s structured to spend down over time across four priorities: expanded scholarships, experiential learning (including a beefed-up Summer Public Interest Fellowship Program), student-success support like bar-exam advising, and growth of the Corporate Law Center, anchored by a new endowed chair.
The payoff came almost immediately—in the gift’s first year, every student who applied for a fully funded fellowship got one, a 30 percent jump in funded participants.
Klekamp has said much of the credit belongs to his late wife, Marianne, a fellow UC alumna who died in December 2022 after a long battle with breast cancer.
The two were married 65 years and raised five children—Peter, Jody, Amy Geers, Molly Tassone, and Rebecca Keating.
“They taught us many values that have contributed to our success—integrity, diligence, and the importance of giving back,” Peter Klekamp said at the announcement.
This isn’t even the family’s biggest recent pledge.
In September 2024, Peter Klekamp and family committed a planned $60 million to Xavier University—the largest gift in that school’s history—which landed the Klekamps at No. 38 on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of America’s 50 largest individual donors for 2024.
Between the two commitments, the family now ranks among the most consequential philanthropic forces in Cincinnati’s history, and Donald Klekamp himself stands as the single largest individual donor behind this year’s UC record.
The rest of the year’s giving was led by a $20 million Gardner Family Foundation gift to the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute, plus smaller but notable commitments from George Bemis Jr. ($15 million bequest to the College of Medicine), the Alpaugh Foundation ($10 million estate gift), and a handful of other alumni and physician donors.
Beyond the marquee names, the breadth was real too: over 32,800 donors made more than 45,000 gifts this year, scholarship funding hit $40.4 million, and 119 estate gifts brought in $57 million—a reminder that this record was built as much on planned and legacy giving as on headline checks.