Nike co-founder Phil Knight donates $1B to Oregon

EUGENE, Ore. (KPTV) — Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, have donated $1 billion to the University of Oregon to build an engineering school, marking the largest gift in the school’s history, according to Forbes.

This comes one week after the Knight family announced a $1.1 billion donation gift to Providence in Portland.

“Phil and Penny Knight have a long history of believing in things before they exist,” University of Oregon President Karl Scholz said in a statement. “They did it in 2016, and they are doing it again now, at a scale that is genuinely hard to take in. I am grateful to them, and I am grateful to be here for it.”

Knight ran track for the Ducks under coach Bill Bowerman before earning a business degree at Oregon in 1959 and an MBA from Stanford in 1962. A Stanford paper he wrote about importing Japanese athletic shoes led him and Bowerman to launch Nike, which grew into a global sportswear power.

The couple has contributed more than $5 billion to higher education, including a record $2 billion gift in 2025 to the Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute. At Oregon, previous donations funded the library, the basketball arena named for their late son Matthew, and two $500 million gifts to establish the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact.