A plan to establish an entrepreneurial-activities academy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign received a $4.5 million grant Monday from a Missouri foundation.
The grant, the largest of eight announced by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, will “create a program that brings faculty from all over the campus to work with students in entrepreneurship,” said Avijit Ghosh, dean of the university’s College of Business.
“Business schools have produced a lot of good entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurship is not limited to business schools,” he said.
Under the program, the university would partner with Howard University in Washington, D.C., and the University of Texas at El Paso to expand efforts with African-American and Hispanic faculty and graduate students.
Paul Magelli, director of OSBI Consulting, a student-run consulting firm, said the eight grants could be the “genetic moment to legitimize entrepreneurship [as a discipline] within U.S. higher education.” Magelli wrote the grant proposal.
Other grant recipients were Florida International University, Miami, $3 million; Howard, $3.1 million; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, $3.5 million; University of Rochester, $3.5 million; University of Texas-El Paso, $2 million; Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C., $2.16 million; and Washington University, St. Louis, $3 million.
