$600 million in gifts and counting: major donations from Riccio, Marieb, Manning, Berthiaume, and Paros families lead university’s history‑making “accelerate” campaign
UMass Amherst’s flagship campus has crossed a historic philanthropic threshold, quietly recasting the scale of public higher education fundraising in Massachusetts. With its “Accelerate:
The Campaign for UMass Amherst” effort now surpassing the $600 million mark—18 months ahead of schedule—the university has secured the largest fundraising total ever recorded by a public university in the Commonwealth and the most ambitious campaign in its own 162-year history.
Publicly launched in 2024, Accelerate was conceived as a $600 million effort to expand educational access, underwrite pioneering research and creative activity, and reinforce UMass Amherst’s role as a driver of opportunity and economic growth for the state.
That goal has now been met and exceeded through more than 100,000 donors, ranging from alumni making modest annual gifts to a small group of transformative benefactors whose naming-level commitments are now redefining the campus map and its academic ambitions.
Buoyed by momentum, the UMass Amherst Foundation has opted not to stop at the target but to continue the campaign through June 30, 2027, to align philanthropy with the university’s long-range strategic plan and hedge against softening federal research support and intensifying financial pressures on students and faculty alike.
Chancellor Javier A. Reyes framed the campaign’s success as both an endorsement of mission and a lifeline for a new generation of students and scholars.
Every donated dollar, he noted, can help a student stay enrolled, give a faculty member room to pursue an emerging research idea, or improve the campus’s physical and intellectual infrastructure in ways that ripple far beyond Amherst and the Pioneer Valley.
System President Marty Meehan went further, casting the outcome as a “difference for generations” moment for the flagship, while UMass Foundation chair Robert J. Manning—whose own family’s philanthropy already anchors one of the campus’s fastest-rising colleges—called the record level of private support a sign that the institution has become an investment of choice for donors intent on coupling public access with academic excellence.
The campaign’s architecture reveals a comprehensive reshaping of priorities rather than a narrow focus on bricks and mortar.
Of the more than $600 million raised to date, $329.3 million is earmarked for academic programs across the university, including business, engineering, nursing, computer science, the arts, and the social sciences.
Student aid accounts for $176.8 million, explicitly targeting scholarships and “high-impact” learning experiences—study abroad, internships, and undergraduate research alongside faculty—that often determine whether a public university student graduates with a competitive edge or simply with a degree.
Another $66.6 million has been committed to attracting and retaining outstanding faculty and staff, a critical concern as public institutions compete globally for research talent, while $32 million is designated for facilities to strengthen the physical plant supporting laboratories, studios, and classroom innovation.
In all, the UMass Amherst endowment will grow by more than $250 million as these commitments are fulfilled, providing a durable source of support in a volatile funding climate.
Behind the aggregate totals, a cluster of headline-making gifts has emerged to anchor the campaign’s public narrative and signal the university’s strategic direction.
At the forefront is a transformational $50 million commitment from Daniel J. Riccio Jr., a 1986 engineering graduate who later became one of Apple’s most influential hardware leaders during a 26-year tenure at the company.
Riccio’s gift, the largest in UMass Amherst history, will name the Daniel J. Riccio Jr. College of Engineering and is structured to support both immediate needs and long-term priorities: scholarships and fellowships, endowed professorships, and seed funding for new initiatives meant to push the college to the forefront of fields ranging from advanced manufacturing and materials to climate resilience and computing.
The university has pledged to amplify this philanthropy with an additional $25 million in institutional resources, including matching funds from a system-wide endowment program, effectively turning Riccio’s personal largesse into a larger engine for faculty recruitment and graduate student support.
Riccio, who grew up in Revere and has often described UMass as his launchpad to the global technology stage, cast his gift as a bet on untapped potential.
He has publicly argued that with the right level of investment and support, the engineering program at UMass Amherst—already ranked among New England’s top public engineering schools—can become a national leader in both research and workforce preparation.
State leaders have taken up that narrative, with Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll hailing the gift as a way to keep Massachusetts at the forefront of engineering and scientific discovery at a time when states are competing aggressively for high-tech talent and research investment.
For UMass Amherst Foundation President Arwen Duffy, Riccio’s philanthropy is a “bold counterforce” to an era marked by cuts to research and student support, enabling the university to expand discovery, innovation, and social impact from a public platform.
If engineering is being refashioned as a flagship of innovation, the university’s nursing program has simultaneously been recast as a national stage for health-care transformation through a $21.5 million naming gift from the Elaine Nicpon Marieb Charitable Foundation.
As announced earlier, the contribution—the then-largest cash gift in UMass Amherst history—renamed the college the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing and has been integrated into the Accelerate campaign as a cornerstone commitment.
The foundation’s support is underwriting scholarships for students with financial need, an endowed professorship to attract top-tier educators and researchers, and an expanded network of simulation labs and clinical learning environments designed to mirror the complexities of contemporary health-care settings.
A signature component of the gift is the Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation, which explicitly aligns nursing education with engineering and technology, positioning UMass Amherst at the intersection of patient care, device innovation, and systems design.
The donors behind the Marieb Foundation have framed their support as both a tribute to the college’s namesake and a direct response to the current pressures on the nursing profession.
Elaine Nicpon Marieb, a bestselling author of anatomy and physiology and a UMass Amherst alumna, leveraged her publishing success to advance a philanthropic agenda focused on improving nursing education and strengthening the practitioner pipeline. In the wake of a global pandemic and ongoing workforce shortages, the naming gift allows the college to scale its ambitions at a time when public investment alone would not suffice.
For UMass Amherst, the impact is reputational and practical: the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing now stands as a centerpiece of the university’s claim to educate professionals whose careers will shape the delivery of care across Massachusetts and beyond.
Another defining contribution comes from Robert J. and Donna Manning, whose $18 million naming gift to the College of Information and Computer Sciences has created the Robert and Donna Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences.
The Mannings, longtime champions of the UMass system, have become emblematic of a new class of public university benefactors: alumni whose fortunes were built in financial services and related industries, and who are now using their philanthropy to strengthen fields that underpin the digital economy.
Their UMass Amherst gift is explicitly geared toward “computing for the common good,” a theme that threads through investments in artificial intelligence, data science, cybersecurity, and socially responsible technology development.
It builds on the couple’s wider pattern of giving across the UMass system and reinforces Robert Manning’s role as a philanthropic leader whose own service as Foundation chair has coincided with a dramatic scaling up of private support.
At the Isenberg School of Management, Douglas and Diana Berthiaume have emerged as the campaign’s marquee donors with a $20 million commitment that strengthens the school’s academic and entrepreneurial capabilities.
Their gift bolsters faculty support, funds doctoral fellowships, and finances a new behavioral research laboratory, while expanding resources at the Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship, effectively turning Isenberg into a stronger training ground for founders and innovators.
Doug Berthiaume, a 1971 alumnus and a co-chair of the Accelerate campaign, has linked his giving to a belief that UMass Amherst can drive both economic growth and societal impact through research and partnerships that bring novel ideas to market. In his own public remarks, he has emphasized the “enduring foundation for transformational research” that a stable, donor-backed institution can provide, especially in disciplines where experimental work and commercialization bridges are critical.
A $10 million gift from Jerome and Linda Paros extends that research emphasis into the atmospheric sciences, endowing the Paros Center for Atmospheric Research within the College of Engineering.
The gift supports faculty and students conducting weather and climate research, including the development of advanced sensing technologies and modeling tools to better predict and mitigate severe storms and other environmental risks.
For UMass Amherst, the Paros endowment adds a high-visibility climate and atmospheric research hub to its portfolio at a moment when public universities are under growing pressure to contribute solutions to climate change. For the donors, it is a way to translate technical expertise and philanthropic capacity into a durable institutional platform focused on atmospheric and environmental resilience.
While these naming-level donors shape the campaign’s visible landscape, the university has emphasized that the philanthropic engine powering Accelerate is broad-based.
The bulk of contributions have come in gifts under $10,000, a cumulative wave of support from alumni, parents, faculty, staff, and friends whose combined impact is underwriting scholarships, athletics, faculty research, experiential learning, and innovative teaching methods across every school and college.
More than 98,000 donors had already contributed $452 million by the time the campaign was formally launched in 2024, an early indicator that the UMass Amherst community would respond vigorously once a public target was announced.
The long tail of modest gifts—often directed to specific departments, programs, or affinity areas—has helped ensure that the campaign’s benefits extend well beyond the high-profile colleges that attract eight- and nine-figure commitments.
The campaign’s volunteer and ambassador structure has also been calibrated to mirror the institution’s scale and aspirations. In addition to the UMass Amherst Foundation Board of Directors and the university’s Alumni Association board, a trio of co-chairs—Berthiaume, marketing executive and alumna Michelle Cardinal, and alumna and multi-generation UMass parent Karen Peters—have worked to galvanize alumni at every giving level.
Cardinal has been explicit about the generational mobility that a UMass education afforded her and many of her peers, describing the campaign as an effort to “open doors for students who may not otherwise have had the opportunity” to attend college, study abroad, or complete internships.
Peters, whose family includes six UMass students and graduates, has framed her involvement as a way to “cement the university’s ability” to provide an affordable, dynamic education to students from all backgrounds while sustaining research with “meaningful implications for the wider community.”
Institutionally, the decision to extend fundraising through mid-2027 reflects both opportunity and necessity. On one hand, the early arrival at the $600 million mark gives UMass Amherst a rare chance to convert campaign momentum into a larger, more ambitious philanthropic baseline, one that could better insulate the university from future shocks to state and federal budgets.
On the other, the university faces the same headwinds confronting public research institutions nationwide: rising costs, intensifying competition for federal research dollars, and growing demand for financial aid as students and families confront escalating tuition, housing, and living expenses.
By continuing to solicit support for scholarships, faculty, and programmatic innovation, UMass Amherst is effectively using the campaign to re-balance its revenue portfolio toward private philanthropy while still maintaining its identity as a public institution rooted in accessibility and service.
In the broader context of American higher education, UMass Amherst’s Accelerate effort does not yet rank among the largest national campaigns—flagship institutions and private universities increasingly announce multi-billion-dollar goals—but it represents a significant recalibration of expectations for public university philanthropy in Massachusetts.
The university’s previous campaign, UMass Rising, concluded in 2016 with $279 million from more than 103,000 donors, less than half the scale of the current effort.
The leap from that benchmark to a $600 million-plus campaign underscores how the institution has grown in both alumni capacity and institutional confidence.
It also places UMass Amherst in a more competitive position as public universities seek to use private giving not merely to fill budget gaps but to sharpen their research profiles, seed interdisciplinary initiatives, and compete for talent on a global stage.
As Accelerate moves into its extended phase through 2027, attention will increasingly turn to how effectively the university translates its fundraising success into measurable outcomes—student debt levels, graduation rates, research output, partnerships with industry and communities, and the diversity of its student and faculty populations. For now, however, the campaign’s trajectory has already altered the narrative about what is possible for a public university in the Commonwealth.
Led by a cohort of major donors whose gifts have redefined key colleges in engineering, nursing, business, computer science, and atmospheric research, and backed by tens of thousands of smaller contributions that anchor its public character, UMass Amherst has turned a once-aspirational $600 million goal into a new floor rather than a ceiling for its philanthropic ambitions.