Pharmacy School

Eshelman, founder of Eshelman Ventures LLC in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the founding chairman of Furiex Pharmaceuticals, has sat on UNC’s Board of Visitors for more than a decade and had already donated about $38 million, funding the Eshelman School of Pharmacy. The $100 million gift will create a center within the school named the Eshelman Institute for Innovation, the university said.

“I am inspired by the work being done by students, faculty and staff in the School of Pharmacy,” Eshelman said in a Dec. 6 press release. “In the past 10 years, the school has generated more than 130 patents and created 15 spin-off companies.”

When contacted by Bloomberg, Eshelman’s office said he was traveling overseas and couldn’t be reached for comment.

A concentration of donations like Eshelman’s disproportionately tends to serve the personal interests and values of an elite set of benefactors, making the philanthropy “less democratic,” Rooney said.

Giving Preferences

Giving preferences vary among income classes. Households with adjusted gross income less than $100,000 give two-thirds of their charity to religious organizations, while those with more than $1 million give the bulk to higher education, health organizations, and to a lesser extent, cultural institutions, Giving USA found.

Reich, who is a faculty co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford, found that across income classes, very little charitable giving goes directly to supporting the basic needs of strangers.

“Philanthropy appears to be more about the pursuit of one’s own projects, a mechanism for the expression of one’s values or preferences rather than a mechanism for the redistribution or relief for the poor,” Reich wrote in a 2013 paper published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

America’s largest charities, such as the United Way, Salvation Army, and American Red Cross, are losing ground to another form of giving preferred by the wealthy. Donor-advised- funds are vehicles that allow people to deposit capital in an account for an immediate tax deduction, and decide how they’ll donate later.