Miami's Farmer School gets up to $100 million from the family foundation that has backed it since 1992

The Farmer Family Foundation intends to give Miami University's Farmer School of Business up to $100 million over the next decade, starting with $55 million over three years, the Ohio university announced on November 5. Miami called it the largest gift in its 217-year history.

It is the latest in a run of gifts from one family to one school. Richard T. "Dick" Farmer, a 1956 Miami business graduate who founded the business that became the uniform company Cintas, and his wife, Joyce Farmer, a 1957 graduate, made what the university calls the cornerstone gift to its business school in 1992. The school now carries his name. Dick Farmer died in August 2021 at 86, according to the university.

What does the gift pay for?

Career preparation, mostly. Miami says the money will speed up the school's strategic priorities, with a goal of a personal career plan for every student, plus industry certifications, global experiential learning, and skills in emerging technology. A separate $25 million matching gift invites other donors to support quantitative skills, technology, experiential learning and career readiness. The announcement does not say whether the match counts toward the $100 million, and it gives no terms for the money after the first three years.

"This gift isn't about changing who we are; it's about amplifying what we already do best," said Jenny Darroch, dean of the Farmer School, in the announcement. The school serves more than 5,000 students, Miami said, and with this gift the university passed the $1 billion goal of its campaign, called For love. For honor. For those who will. Miami did not give a campaign total.

How did one family's giving build to this?

In four steps that Miami has described publicly, each larger than the last. After the 1992 cornerstone gift, for which Miami's accounts give no amount, the Farmers announced a $30 million leadership gift through the foundation a little more than a decade later, $25 million of which helped pay for the Farmer School building, according to the university's 2021 remembrance of Dick Farmer. Miami's new announcement dates the building gift to 2005 and says that about a decade later came a $40 million gift, "which was then the largest amount given to the university." The new pledge is two and a half times that one.

The family's son, Scott Farmer, a 1981 graduate and executive chairman of Cintas, is a trustee of the foundation, along with his mother and five others listed in the announcement. "The Farmer family has a long and treasured relationship with Miami University," he said.

How big is the pledge for the foundation?

Large, even for a foundation worth more than $1 billion. The Farmer Family Foundation, a Cincinnati private foundation, reported paying $44.1 million in grants in 2023 on its Form 990-PF, the latest year with figures extracted by ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer. By our arithmetic, the first $55 million installment works out to about $18.3 million a year if paid evenly over three years, or roughly 42% of that 2023 grant total.

It also follows closely on another record gift. On October 19, The Christ Hospital Health Network in Cincinnati announced a $50 million commitment from the foundation, the largest gift in that network's history. Seventeen days later came the Miami pledge. The two commitments add up to as much as $150 million, though neither announcement says exactly when the money will be paid.

The last column is our calculation from the returns and is not the legal payout measure, which uses average monthly values and counts more than grants. Grants paid rose by about 65% from 2019 to 2023, from $26.7 million to $44.1 million.

Why do the two asset figures differ so much?

Because the return reports both. Book value generally records an asset at what was paid for it or what it was worth when received, while market value is what it was worth at year end, so long-held investments can be worth many times their book figure. In 2023 the foundation's market value was 7.3 times its book value. The IRS's summary record lists about $242.2 million in assets for 2024, a figure in line with the book values above and the one we cited for the foundation in October; we have added a clarification to that story. Our guide to reading a Form 990 explains where each figure sits.

What other schools and donors can take from this

In our view, the pattern is the lesson: a cornerstone gift, then a building, then a record gift, then a bigger one, over 34 years. A matching component, like the $25 million here or the Gies match at Illinois, also turns one donor's gift into an ask to everyone else. The first return that could show payments on either pledge is the foundation's return for 2026, due in May 2027, or in November 2027 with the automatic six-month extension the IRS allows.