Philanthropy
Batten became the first Rector of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, served on the boards of the College of William and Mary and Hollins College, and served as Vice Chairmain of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
His gifts to schools and institutions include $32 million to the Harvard Business School, $60 million to the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia, $32 million to Old Dominion University, and various scholarships, such as the Batten Scholarship at the Culver Academies. On April 12, 2007, Batten made a gift of $100 million to the University of Virginia, the largest gift in the University's history, to establish the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, and in 2006, $2 million to Hollins College.
Batten donated to the Norfolk Academy, for the school's library, as well as to the City of Norfolk for a new downtown library.
In 2009, he also started the $50 million dollar Batten Challenge at the Culver Academies, where he would match every dollar donated to the school during 2009-2010 with a dollar of his own.
Read more about this topic: Frank Batten
Famous quotes containing the word philanthropy:
“I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Almost every man we meet requires some civility,—requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... the hey-day of a woman’s life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)