$50 million gift from Lyndal Stephens Greth opens paths to the next generation of students at university, raising her family’s philanthropic giving to over $300 million
When Autry C. Stephens was a boy in De Leon, Texas, the future he could see stopped at the farm’s fence line.
His family raised peanuts and melons, peaches, and cantaloupes on land about 80 miles southeast of Abilene.
Farming taught him patience and thrift, and it taught him to live without guarantees.
He later said the farm’s good years and bad years got him ready for the oil business, which ran the same way.
His father could have kept him home to work the land. Instead, he told his son to go to college.
Autry did, and he was the first in his family to go.
Recently, his daughter made sure many more young Texans will get the same chance.
The Stephens Greth Foundation, which Lyndal Stephens Greth founded and leads as director and executive chairman, has committed $50 million to The University of Texas at Austin.
The gift creates the Autry C. Stephens Scholarship for students from the Permian Basin. That is the stretch of West Texas her father spent four decades betting on when almost no one else would.
The gift also supports the Autry C. Stephens Engineering Discovery Building, which opened on campus last month.
The scholarship gift will be matched dollar for dollar through the Texas Challenge, so every foundation dollar for scholarships becomes two.
It is also the gift that completes the challenge.
Over the life of the program, the UT System Board of Regents put up $160 million in matching funds.
Together with donors, the Challenge created 615 new scholarships and $320 million in new aid for strong Texas students from middle- and low-income families.
“My hope for the next generation of UT students is they find inspiration in my father’s journey,” Greth said.
“I want them to know that it’s OK if their path isn’t straight or predictable—sometimes the most rewarding careers come from taking chances and embracing change.”
Her father’s path was anything but straight.
He arrived in Austin in the 1950s behind in math and later called himself “an accidental engineer.” He said his brain was “wired different” from the typical orderly engineer.
He made up for it, in his words, by being “highly motivated, creative, and a risk-taker.”
He had read that petroleum engineers worked outdoors in faraway places, and he pictured himself in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo.
“Nothing has worked out as I imagined,” he said years later, with the dry humor friends knew well.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering in 1961 and his master’s a year later. Then came Humble Oil, the forerunner of ExxonMobil.
He stepped away from Humble for two years to serve in the Army Corps of Engineers.
He asked for pipeline work and served as a lieutenant and platoon leader in charge of fuel installations.
Later he took a job as an appraisal engineer at the First National Bank of Midland.
In 1979, he went out on his own as a consulting engineer, drilled a well in Midland County, and started what became Endeavor Energy Resources.
The early years were hard.
Oil prices swung wildly, and money was difficult to raise.
Stephens put his cash flow back into the business and kept buying land, often West Texas acreage the major companies had passed over.
Over time, he gathered drilling rights to more than 350,000 acres. He held them for decades, as UT puts it, “until drilling technology caught up with his intuition.”
He built his own drilling, fracking, construction, and trucking companies to keep costs down. In 1996, he started Big Dog Drilling, a family pier-drilling company.
He called the jobs it created his proudest achievement.
By the end, Endeavor had more than 1,100 employees and had helped create thousands more jobs across the region.
He never lived like a tycoon. He drove old cars and flew Southwest, usually in economy.
He did business on a handshake, gave people second and third chances, and liked his coffee at the Petroleum Club of Midland.
A friend said one of his favorite places to eat was El Banquete, a modest Mexican restaurant on Midland’s south side where a breakfast burrito cost about five dollars.
Scott Sheffield, the founder of Pioneer Natural Resources, called him “the Sam Walton of the oil and gas industry.” Former Commerce Secretary Don Evans pointed to Santa Rita No. 1, the Permian discovery well on University lands named for the patron saint of the impossible.
He suggested Stephens be remembered as “the patron saint of the Permian Basin.”
To Evans and his wife, Penny, Stephens was also “a humble, soft-spoken gentleman with a sweet and caring soul.”
Outside the oil business, he was barely known.
He rarely gave interviews.
His one turn in the spotlight was a cameo on the reality series “Black Gold,” about the search for oil in West Texas.
Lyndal grew up in that world.
She graduated from Midland’s Lee High School in 1993, studied English at Southern Methodist University, and earned her law degree at Baylor.
She practiced as an attorney before joining Endeavor’s board as vice chairman in 2013.
When her father was diagnosed with cancer, he finally agreed, after years of turning down offers, to merge Endeavor with Diamondback Energy, another Midland company, in a $26 billion deal.
He died in Midland in August 2024 at 86, surrounded by the family he adored: his wife of many years, Linda, their children, Joe and Lyndal, and two grandchildren.
Lyndal became chairman and saw the company through the final weeks of the deal.
Then she began building what would come next.
That meant two institutions.
SGF Capital, the Dallas-based family office she founded, serves Autry Stephens’ descendants.
The Stephens Greth Foundation, started with about $2 billion in 2024, was built to carry his values into communities across Texas. Its board reflects the family’s roots.
Her husband, Richard W. Greth Jr., learned real estate and construction working for his father, a general contractor in Midland.
He studied management at Texas Tech, and he brings a particular passion for veterans and first responders.
The foundation’s chief executive, Jennifer Sampson, spent a quarter-century at United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, the last 15 years as its president.
The foundation describes its approach as Lyndal’s way of listening first to the people closest to a problem, paired with her father’s engineering instinct to understand the problem, ask the right questions, and look for practical, lasting answers.
The foundation has moved quickly.
It has made 106 grants to more than 90 nonprofits, totaling $295 million.
Those include $100 million to Children’s Health and UT Southwestern for a new pediatric campus in Dallas, $15.5 million to United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, the largest gift in that organization’s history, and $8 million to the SPCA of Texas.
The UT commitment is the most personal of them all.
“My dad always recognized his education at The University of Texas as one of the major building blocks in his life,” Greth has said, “a game changer on his path from the melon patch to oil patch.”
The building that now carries his name gives that idea a physical home.
The 207,000-square-foot Autry C. Stephens Engineering Discovery Building opened on September 18.
It is the new home of the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering and the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, ranked No. 2 and No. 5 in the nation.
It has more than 70,000 square feet of research labs, flipped classrooms built for hands-on learning, and lab spaces that can open up and connect so research groups can work side by side.
Offices and lounges look out over the Austin skyline. A walkway links it to the Gary L. Thomas Energy Engineering Building. Outside, the redesigned Mulva Courtyard will feature a new installation by the artist and architect Maya Lin.
The building completes $820 million in new engineering facilities on campus over the past decade, including $215 million from alumni and friends.
“I hope students walk through this building and know that my father’s legacy is about more than just success in business—it’s about resilience, humility, and making a difference,” Greth said.
Its true meaning, she added, will be in the students it serves: “those who walk in uncertain, searching for their path, and leave with the confidence to shape the future.”
UT President Jim Davis described the scholarship as a door opened for families who have long sent their children east to Austin.
“Their generosity will support hardworking families in West Texas as they send their sons and daughters to our university to become the next great leaders in our state,” he said.
Roger Bonnecaze, dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering, put it simply: “We are so proud of Autry.”
Somewhere in Midland or Odessa, Big Spring, or Pecos, there is a teenager this fall with good grades, a lot of drive, and no clear plan, maybe the first in the family to think about college at all.
Autry Stephens was once that student.
His advice to those who came after him was simple.
A degree “is just a license to learn,” he said.
“Don’t let fear of failure keep you from following your dream.”
Thanks to his daughter, the next student from his part of Texas will have help paying for that start.