A UK professor took a collect call. Now the department gets $6 million gift and a new name.
Bing Zhang grew up in the country of the Jiangsu province of China, but knew he wanted to attend graduate school in the United States. In 1989, he applied to 10 statistics programs, but got into only one— the University of Kentucky.
In the days before email, he had to call the department to make final arrangements, so he called collect. (For anyone under the age of 30, this was a landline call where you reversed the very expensive cost of international calls.) Luckily professor Connie Wood picked up the phone and accepted the charges. When Zhang arrived two weeks after school started, Wood made sure he still had a graduate teaching position.
Zhang got both his graduate degrees from UK; a masters in computer science and a Ph.D. in statistics. He went on to form the company MacroStat, among others, which analyzes the design and efficacy of pharmaceutical trials in multiple operations in the U.S. and China.
To show his gratitude, Zhang is now giving $6.3 million to the statistics department, which will now be named after him: Dr. Bing Zhang Department of Statistics, hereby known as the Zhang Department. Zhang has already endowed a chair in honor of his major professor at UK, David Allen. This new gift will endow two more chairs and help attract and pay for top graduate students.
“My statistical knowledge was almost nothing when I started studying at UK,” Zhang said in a release. “I learned a lot of statistical theory at UK and got a high-quality education at UK that has led to a successful career and a fulfilling life for me. So, I’m really proud to be a member of the UK family, and I appreciate the high-quality education.”
The department name change was not Zhang’s idea, said Mark Kornbluh, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
“He was not looking for publicity or public thanks,” Kornbluh said. “He’s a very modest person. I explained to him that the best universities have named departments and named chairs and we would like to do this ... but it came from us.”
The gift and naming have been approved by the statistics department and the university senate; the Board of Trustees is expected to approve at their Friday meeting.
New funding sources
UK has been on a roll with naming rights lately, partly as a way to make up for $70 million in recurring cuts in state funding since 2008. There’s Kroger Field ($22 million), the Lewis Honors College ($23 million) the Gatton Student Center ($20 milllon) and most recently, the J. David Rosenberg College of Law ($20 million).
Statistics is just the second named department after the $7 million Joseph Halcomb Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering. But it’s a tricky path, as even the “best universities” have found because honorees may do something or come to represent less than the ascribed values of the institution, such as the tumult over Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy or Tufts University’s decision to take the Sackler name off five buildings and programs because of the name’s association with the opioid epidemic.
UK found out the hard way that sometimes big gifts have complicated consequences, hence the former John H. Schnatter Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise at UK’s Gatton College.
First, the $10 million gift attracted a great deal of negative national attention in 2015 because the gift was also funded by Charles Koch Foundation, which has a well-documented agenda of making higher education more conservative. Then in 2018, Schnatter resigned from his pizza empire after using a racial epithet in public. UK returned Schnatter’s gift and took his name off the institute and off the atrium of the new Gatton College.
Kornbluh says Zhang’s gift has no strings attached. It will be used for another endowed chair, and to help fund top graduate students, and whatever else the faculty approves.
“In this case, the university did due diligence, we understand where he made his money, we know his character,” he said. “In this case, the donor did not dictate use of his money.”
So thank you to Dr. Zhang. Still, I think there are plenty of people besides myself who feel that the higher education economic model has gone berserk: Everything is for sale, and the donations come rolling in, but the buildings get bigger, the food gets fancier and the costs never, ever seem to go down for students. And that’s before we even get to athletics.
But that’s not just a UK problem. It’s all over Kentucky, and the country, and until we elect people who see higher education as a public good that’s worth funding, it’s probably not going to change. So when you go back to your college reunion and see the Mortimer Snerd Department of English or the Acme Corporation Computer Science Program, you really shouldn’t be surprised.
This story was originally published February 20, 2020 at 9:52 AM.
