Newswise — The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a $5 million endowment gift from members of the Liautaud family to establish the Liautaud Graduate School of Business.
The Liautaud Graduate School of Business, named for donors Jim, Gina and Jimmy John Liautaud, will be an administrative unit consolidating post-baccalaureate programs with almost 1,000 students.
The school will be part of the UIC College of Business Administration. Income from the cash gift will finance MBA, M.S. in accounting, M.S. and Ph.D. in management information systems, M.A. in real estate, and Ph.D. in business administration graduate programs within the school and future advanced-degree business programs.
"The Liautaud family's generosity will allow us to offer students even more of the best classes, personalized service, and high quality education they need to succeed," said Wim Wiewel, dean of the College of Business Administration. "We are very proud to have their support for our graduate school of business."
The school has strengths in entrepreneurship, finance, and strategic management, and is starting a new master's of real estate next fall. A key objective of the school is to increase external funding for the post-baccalaureate programs and to increase the number of students.
The Liautaud Graduate School of Business will be headed by the associate dean for graduate business programs, who will report to Wiewel. Operating responsibility for the individual degree programs rests with the directors of the graduate programs who will continue to make admissions and all other decisions.
"This gift is a payback for what the university has done for our family over the past years and represents our entire family's present and future financial commitment to the graduate business school of UIC," said Jim Liautaud.
"Our special thanks go to Wim Wiewel, who presented this initiative to our family a few years ago," added Gina Liautaud, who is Jim's wife.
Their son, Jimmy John Liautaud, said Wiewel's commitment to the project has been "extraordinary."
"I've gotten to know Wim Wiewel very well over the last several years," Liautaud said. "I'm excited about supporting that commitment and the way it will positively affect the future of the new Liautaud Graduate School of Business."
Jim Liautaud received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1963, after attending UIC. Jim started a number of companies that manufactured products that emanated from patents he developed for combining composite plastics and metals.
His products included the mass-airflow sensor for GM's first fuel-injection engines, the air-bag sensors for all of Ford's trucks and cars in the early '80s, and a multitude of other products as diverse as radar detectors and circuit chips used to program memory boards.
In 1983, the American Society of Professional Engineers honored him for the Design of the Year, and in 1989 he was named a distinguished alumnus of the UIUC College of Engineering. In 1992, he approached the UIC College of Business Administration about creating a family business council and underwrote the development of that unit.
Gina Liautaud received her B.S. in elementary education in 1961 from UIUC after also attending UIC, and was elected UIUC's Homecoming Queen in 1959. She is very active in charitable organizations, including serving as president of Children's Hope, an organization that provides operations for Lithuanian children with severe orthopedic handicaps. Last year she was elected Lithuania's Woman of the Year in Vilnius, Lithuania's capital and her birthplace.
Jimmy John Liautaud is the 39-year-old founder of Jimmy John's Gourmet Sandwich Shops. He started the business after he graduated high school. Jimmy John's has more than 250 locations throughout the Midwest and southeastern United States, predominantly on college campuses.
Jimmy John is active in civic and charitable activities in Champaign-Urbana, Ill. and a major donor to the Fighting Illini Scholarship Fund at UIUC.
All three members of the Liautaud family are on the University of Illinois President's Council.
The UIC College of Business Administration educates more business undergraduates than any other institution in the Chicagoland area. The college's entrepreneurship program was ranked third in the nation in the most recent rankings by Success magazine. NASDAQ recently named the program a Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence.
For more information about UIC, visit http://www.uic.edu
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