The University Of Vermont has received its largest one-time gift in the college’s 225-year history.
$19.7 million in commercial property and cash was donated to the UVM’s School of Medicine by Dr. Robert Larner and his wife, Helen. Larner is a 1939 graduate of the university and a 1942 graduate of its medical school. Their latest gift brings the couple's total donations to more than $33 million and makes them the most generous donors in the university's history.
The donation creates an ongoing source of revenue for the university, according to UVM College of Medicine Dean Rick Morin. “This gift was nineteen point seven million dollars. One million of that was cash, which is just coming in as cash. Eighteen point seven is the value of the property. And in October we received another gift of property which was eight point seven million dollars. So really in the last six months it's been twenty eight point four million dollars that the Larner’s have given. And those two properties together will generate about a million dollars a year of income for the educational mission here.”
Income from the donated properties, located in Los Angeles, will be directed to UVM’s medical education programs. Morin says revenues will be invested in state-of-the-art teaching technologies such as 3-D virtual training. “The data are really clear that engaged active learning is better than lectures. So we're going to be converting to that kind of student education and we're going to be using all the newest technologies. There's a new table that looks like a dissection table you would have a cadaver on. But instead it’s got a 3-D image in there that the students can do virtual dissection in. And they’re even working on the next level of that which is the goggles where you're in a 3-D world and you're the surgeon and you're inside the belly or the heart operating. That's the kind of technologies we’ll be introducing.”
The gift from the Larners also advances the University of Vermont Foundation’s Move Mountains campaign. Foundation President and CEO Rich Bundy explains it’s an eight-year comprehensive effort to raise $500 million by 2019. “Every gift made during the campaign time frame counts against the campaign goal. Medical education programs in the College of Medicine were identified very early in the campaign as one of the strategic priorities for private investment. And so this gift which will be used specifically to advance medical education for our M.D. students in the College of Medicine is lockstep with the campaign's strategic objectives.”
The University of Vermont College of Medicine will open the Larner Classroom in June 2017 when it hosts the International Association of Medical Educators.
