The UT College of Business Administration was given a generous gift of $25,000 from the SunTrust Foundation recently, intended to augment resources available to its programs.
The beneficent donation was allocated specifically for the Department of Finance’s Enrichment Fund. Specifically, the funding will be applied to bolster programs aiding the finance department’s faculty and students.
Jim Wansley, Clayton Homes Chair of Excellence and head of UT’s Department of Finance, supplied the reasoning behind SunTrust’s support for his department.
“The simple answer is that we asked for the gift,” Wansley said. “We (the finance department in the College of Business) have had a long and strong relationship with SunTrust. They recruit at our university, and they have hired our students in the past. Each year, several people from SunTrust have spoken to our classes and our student organizations about several topics, including banking and careers in finance.”
The Department of Finance requested this aid to compensate for state budgetary cuts, and the SunTrust Foundation stepped in to fulfill the department’s request.
“SunTrust believes higher education is important, and their gift is, in part, an effort to support higher education,” Wansley said. “A significant part of our (and the college’s) total spending comes from private funds, either gifts outright or endowments where the income is spendable. As state funding has declined over the past years, we have tried to supplement that with private funds … The bank (SunTrust) must have felt that it was a worthwhile contribution.”
Mike Butler, chairman, president and CEO of SunTrust Bank, Eastern Tennessee presented the check to representatives from the college’s faculty. The donation will be applied generally to support the Department of Finance’s faculty and students.
“The funding was specified to go to the Finance Department Excellence Fund, which is a general fund that benefits students and faculty,” Wansley said. “It has not been marked for a specific purpose.”
Jan Williams, dean of the College of Business Administration, reflected on the current financial outlook of his college.
“State support has declined significantly in the last several years,” Williams said. “There have been no salary increases for UT employees for four years.”
Wansley recognized the detrimental impacts of budgetary concerns as well.
“The economic downturn has had a negative effect on the entire university, with funding reduced,” Wansley said. “Faculty and staff have indeed gone for four years without a pay raise, and other areas of the university have been impacted as well. These effects have been felt by other universities across the states.”
While Williams acknowledged some negative repercussions for UT, he also said that some donations are still flowing to the College of Business Administration.
“It is difficult to say how the economic downturn has affected private giving, but it is reasonable to assume that current private giving is down from what it would otherwise have been,” Williams said. “Deferred giving, i.e., estates, on the other hand, is strong.”
Particularly in the field of business, services provided to corporations by the university have seen constriction in their consumer market. Businesses have tightened their belts, reducing budgetary allocation to programs like employee educational enhancement.
“Companies are using executive education, which is big for us, less than before the economic downturn, reducing the resources coming into the college,” Williams said.
SunTrust decided to contribute their gift under the Campaign for Tennessee project, which aims to raise $1 billion for the university. The foundation believed that the gift was especially relevant given the tough budgetary climate postrecession.
Jan R. Williams has been part of the UT faculty since 1977 and is the Stokely Foundation Leadership chair. He has been a faculty member at the University of Georgia and Texas Tech University. To date, he has coauthored three books and more than 70 of his articles are in print, most dealing with corporate financial reporting and accounting education.
James Wansley received his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. He has authored more than two dozen publications and research papers. These works have been published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Financial Services Research, Financial Management, The Financial Review, the Journal of Financial Research and the Journal of Business Finance and Accounting. Wansley’s research targets the method of payment used in acquisitions, as well as the understanding of corporate financial policies.
