FAYETTEVILLE : UA announces $10 million gift for architecture
Posted on Thursday, February 7, 2008
What began as a quest for an easy “A” by a college student more than a half-century ago led to a $ 13 million deferred gift for his alma mater and two other institutions on Wednesday.
When a young Don Edmondson enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1954, little did he know that a lecturer and architect named E. Fay Jones would profoundly change his life.
Jones inspired with his love of architecture, and Edmondson discovered he loved it, too.
“I didn’t know what architecture was about — didn’t even know how to spell it,” Edmondson said.
He knew he wouldn’t become an architect, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t live in a Fay Jones-designed home, or that he couldn’t help future architecture students.
Don and Ellen Edmondson’s $ 10 million gift to the Fayetteville campus’s School of Architecture, announced Wednesday, is not their first — but their largest.
The gift is part of a $ 13 million “planned gift” the Forrest City couple will leave for the Architecture School, the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute and Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock.
The cancer institute, part of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, and the hospital each will receive $ 1. 5 million.
A planned gift is a deferred type that one or more people can designate be given to a recipient from their estate after their deaths.
The Edmondsons’ gift is a type known as an estate and charitable trust gift, said Danielle Strickland, a university spokesman.
Don Edmondson said he and his wife didn’t put restrictions on how the money must be spent. The recipients will consult with the couple, Edmondson said, “but I won’t presume to tell them how to spend it.”
Strickland said UA’s $ 10 million share of the gift ranks as a three-way tie for sixth place on the campus’ top 10 list of largest announced gifts.
The others ranking sixth were both 2005 gifts of $ 10 million, one from an anonymous donor to establish a department of education reform at UA and the other from J. B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. to help build what became the J. B. Hunt Transport Services Center for Academic Excellence.
The three Edmondson gift recipients said a deferred gift — and an unrestricted one — means their institutions don’t have to rush into a decision on how to use the money.
UA architecture Dean Jeff Shannon said he anticipates the school would invest the gift as endowment money, but that the spending decision would be left to the architecture dean at the time the gift is transferred, “because the needs would change.”
Dr. Kent C. Westbrook of the cancer institute said its $ 1. 5 million likely would go toward an endowment.
“By the time it comes, those of us here may be long gone,” Westbrook said. But when the institute’s building campaign wraps up in two years, it will turn its fundraising eye toward building endowments, he said.
Kila Owens with Arkansas Children’s Hospital Foundation said it would determine at the time it receives its $ 1. 5 million “where the need is most great.”
Don Edmondson said that when he began school at UA in spring 1954, he was an awestruck freshman, “the greenest of the green.”
When he entered the campus’s Fine Arts Building, “I had never been inside a modern building, as such.”
His fraternity, eager to up its collective grade point average, suggested he take a course called “appreciation of fine arts,” and he did.
“It was just three hours of ‘A, ’” Edmondson recalled he was told by his Greek brothers. The course covered art, music, theater, modern dance — and architecture.
Jones opened a world of greats such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Edward Durell Stone, and a few international architects that Edmondson can pronounce but not spell.
“His mannerism, the way he talked about the other architects — it just enchanted me,” Edmondson said in a telephone interview from his Jones-designed home in Forrest City.
“I didn’t get the ‘ A, ’” he said. “I may have gotten a ‘ B,’ I don’t know.
“ It inspired me to have a home designed by Fay,” Edmondson said of the house completed in 1980. “It inspired me to try to do well enough in life.”
The retired franchise owner once operated properties such as Holiday Inn, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell in Arkansas and other states.
Unlike other Jones’ designs, the Edmondson home wasn’t formally named.
“It’s just a complete expression of Fay’s philosophy,” Edmondson said.
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