Nike chief to give US$400m for Stanford scholars to address world problems

New York

PHILIP Knight, the co-founder and chairman of Nike Inc, said on Monday that he had pledged to give Stanford University US$400 million to recruit graduate students around the globe to address society's most intractable problems, including poverty and climate change.

The gift to the new Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, which is modelled on the Rhodes scholarships, matches one of the largest individual donations ever to a university, the US$400 million that John Paulson, the hedge fund tycoon, gave to Harvard last year to improve its engineering school. The Stanford project is meant to improve the world. "This is using education to benefit mankind, and I think it really could be transformative," Mr Knight said . "I jumped on it right away."