Largest-Ever Gift To A Canadian B-School Goes To Guelph’s Lang School

Stu Lang meeting with Guelph Lang School students at an award event. The school’s namesake and his wife have gifted the business school $51 million, a record for a Canadian B-school. Guelph photo

The University of Guelph has received the largest donation ever made to a Canadian business school, as entrepreneur and former CFL player Stu Lang and his wife Kim Lang pledged $51 million to the university’s Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics.

The gift surpasses the previous Canadian business school donation record by $1 million, according to reporting by the Toronto Globe and Mail, and marks the second transformational donation from the Lang family to the school in six years. In 2019, the Lang Foundation donated $21 million to the business school, which was subsequently renamed after Stu Lang’s father, Gordon S. Lang, founder of CCL Industries.

Combined, the Lang family has now donated more than $100 million to the university, the school announced.

A ‘FORCE OF GOOD’ VISION FOR BUSINESS EDUCATION

“We see business skills as essential to everything we do as a society, so our gift will have infinite impact,” Lang says in a statement released by the university. “Our donation is meant to support Guelph’s vision of business as a force of good.”

The new donation will fund a three-story expansion at the business school that includes more than 60 breakout rooms and a 500-seat lecture hall, according to The Globe and Mail. It will also launch Lang GoodWorks, a new initiative focused on integrating values-based decision-making into business education, according to the university.

“The Langs’ gift will help us create a collaborative learning experience, with graduates who are competitive but not cutthroat,” Sara Mann, dean of the business school, tells The Globe and Mail.

FROM FORMER RESIDENCE HALL TO RECORD-BREAKING INVESTMENT

According to The Globe and Mail, the Lang School began with classrooms housed in a former student residence. The new investment will also support research and interdisciplinary programs connecting business education with Guelph’s strengths in veterinary medicine and agriculture. The University of Guelph is located about 60 miles west of Toronto in Ontario, Canada.

The donation comes at a difficult financial moment for many Canadian universities. Ontario institutions in particular have faced pressure from years of tuition constraints, declining international student enrollment, and lower per-student provincial funding levels, according to The Globe and Mail.

Fundraising consultants interviewed by the newspaper said large gifts are becoming both more necessary and more ambitious. Last year alone, 286 people donated at least $1 million to educational institutions across Canada, according to a March report from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

“What’s the donor’s personal mission that they want to accomplish through their philanthropy?” fundraising consultant Michael Logue tells the newspaper. “And then how can we marry those two together?”

LANG’S DEEPENING TIES TO GUELPH

Neither Stu nor Kim Lang attended Guelph. Both graduated from Queen’s University, and Stu Lang trained as an engineer rather than in business.

But the family developed close ties to the university after purchasing a farm near Guelph. Kim Lang became involved with the university’s veterinary school through equestrian philanthropy, while Stu Lang later joined the football program as a volunteer receivers coach before becoming head coach of the Guelph Gryphons in 2010, according to The Globe and Mail.

In 2015, Lang led the Gryphons to a Yates Cup championship – the same Ontario university football title he had won decades earlier as a player at Queen’s.

The new gift edges past the previous Canadian business school donation record set in 2015, when financier Stephen Smith donated $50 million to Queen’s business school, according to The Globe and Mail. Lang joked to the newspaper that his slightly larger gift reflected “friendly competition.”

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