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Major gift to establish the Lance and Diane White Family Professorship

Miami University alumnus Lance White and his wife, Diane, will establish the Lance & Diane White Family Professorship. The named professorship will be awarded to an entrepreneurship practitioner. The gift will be matched by The Farmer Family Foundation in support of their Farmer School of Business Assistant Professorship matching gift campaign.

“The White Family Professorship is targeted squarely at the intersection of academia and practicing entrepreneurship and will bring enormous value to our students," said Brett Smith, director for the Institute for Entrepreneurship at Miami and the founding director for the Center for Social Entrepreneurship. "We believe that entrepreneurship is not something you can simply learn in a classroom. You have to live it. The White Family Professorship will bring this philosophy to life for our students.”  

White, himself a successful entrepreneur, said: “I have been on the board of the Institute for over ten years and have been very impressed with the hands-on education the faculty is providing the students.  It’s one thing to study entrepreneurship, but it’s another thing to practice it.  This position will accelerate the students’ ability to do both.”

Lance received his bachelor of science in business from Miami in 1975 with a major in finance and completed his MBA at the Harvard Business School in 1979. He founded and served as the CEO of DCS Sanitation Management until its sale to Packers Sanitation Services, Inc. earlier this year. He also co-founded Froggy’s Car Wash and Conscious Dimensions, LLC. He currently serves as the archive chair for the BMW Car Club of America Foundation and is on the boards of the Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute, E-BEAM Services, Inc., and the Consciousness in Action Foundation.

The Institute for Entrepreneurship has experienced tremendous growth since inception. Both business and non-business majors are quick to appreciate the value of the entrepreneurial skillset and mindset. In the 2012-13 academic year, more than ten percent of the university’s 17,000 undergraduates across more than 60 business and non-business disciplines included entrepreneurship in their course choices. In its most recent survey, the Princeton Review ranked the program the number five public institution and overall twelfth in the nation for best entrepreneurship education, marking the sixth consecutive year it has been included in the top twenty-five.

Ray Gorman, interim dean of the Farmer School, said, “We could not sustain this growth and success without the generous support of alumni and friends like Lance and Diane White, and we are profoundly grateful.”