A $250 million donation that would have been among the largest gifts to higher education in U.S. history has been withdrawn from a small Kentucky liberal arts college, officials said Monday.
Centre College in Danville, Ky., known for hosting vice presidential debates in 2000 and 2012, said Monday that the all-stock gift from the A. Eugene Brockman Charitable Trust was linked to a “significant capital market event” that put considerable time pressure on the college to structure the gift and the proposed scholarship program.
“We’re not happy, in any shape or form, with this outcome,” Centre College President John Roush told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “This would have helped us do better what we’re already doing.”
College officials said they were notified by the trustee last week with word that the gift had been withdrawn. The call informing the school came the same day the business transaction was to close, Richard Trollinger, Centre’s vice president for college relations, said in an interview.
A statement from the school did not include comment from the trust or its trustee. Through a spokesman, the son of the trust’s founder who formed the charitable organization a few years before his death declined to comment Monday.
The donation would have created a Centre College scholarship program next year. Annually, 40 students majoring in the natural and computational sciences and economics would have received the full-ride scholarships, the school had said.
Trollinger said in an interview that the gift was part of a multibillion-dollar “corporate reorganization and recapitalization” that had to take place in a limited amount of time.
