Andre B. Lacy gives $25M to Butler University business school
Business leader Andre B. Lacy never attended Butler University. Nor did he earn an Master of Business Administration from any institution of higher learning.
But none of that stopped Lacy, known throughout Indianapolis for his philanthropy and civic service, from donating $25 million to Butler’s business school, which will now be named in his honor.
For the past decade Lacy, the 75-year-old chairman of Indianapolis holding company LDI Ltd., has worked with students at the Butler program, known for his experiential rather than classroom-based approach to learning. What he saw there led him to decide to make this donation, the largest ever given to Butler by an individual or family.
“Why Butler?” Lacy said to a packed auditorium of Butler students and alumni Tuesday announcing his gift. “I answer that with my own question: Why anywhere else but Butler?”
In addition to sharing his name and money with the school, Lacy also will provide his expertise, serving as senior adviser.
Butler differs from other business schools in its emphasis on closely held businesses, a category that includes family businesses, multigenerational businesses and small businesses, Lacy said. Such businesses constitute about 90 percent of Indiana’s economy.
The school is planning to start a center that will focus on this type of business, Lacy School of Business Dean Stephen Standifird said.
The gift from Andre Lacy and his wife, Julia, however, will go beyond the School of Business on the Butler campus, school officials said.
“This is a transformative gift that will advance the university,” Butler President James Danko said. “This gift will elevate Butler University.”
A gift of this size will have an impact on the school’s reputation among business schools, said Jeffrey Alderman, president and chief executive officer of the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs. (Butler is accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.)
Other schools have used similar donations to attract prestigious faculty, develop new programs and courses, and support current faculty members’ research.
“It raises the profile of the school,” he said. “It really does help the program grow in terms of its accessibility and the people it impacts.”
More than 100 years ago Lacy’s grandfather Howard Lacy and two others founded a company that made cardboard boxes, U.S. Corrugated Fiber Box Co. By the 1980s the company had become LDI, for Lacy Diversified Industries, and included a number of ventures, including medical supplies and automotive paint.
Throughout a Lacy has been at the helm. Today, LDI President and Chief Executive Officer J.A. Lacy, Andre's son, represents the fourth generation of Lacys to lead the company.
Despite Lacy’s vaulted pedigree, students who have worked with him report that he is actually quite approachable. Jenny Hinz, a senior studying business, spent the year working with him as her mentor. Hinz recalled how a recent meeting in Lacy’s Downtown office started with him seated behind his desk and she in a chair on the other side.
Before long, however, Lacy had left his desk chair and pulled a chair over to sit next to Hinz, putting them on more equal footing.
“He truly listened to what I had to say,” Hinz said.
At an earlier meeting, she recalled, Lacy had advised her to write down her goals. He shared with her a piece of paper from 1979 on which he shared with her his own goals: Be a respected member of the community, hold himself to a high ethical standard and nurture his family.
Decades ago as Lacy was in Hinz’s shoes, finishing his economics degree at Denison University, his father died, and upon graduation he returned to Indianapolis to run the business. Any dreams of future education were put on hold.
Not only did Lacy guide the family business with a steady hand, he also threw himself into civic life in Indianapolis, serving as chairman of the Indiana State Fair Commission. He also serves on the board of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and has been involved with Indianapolis Public Schools.
With all that hands-on experience, Lacy said, he “got not only an MBA but also a doctorate.”
About 10 years ago his successor as CEO at LDI asked him whether he would be interested in working with Butler as a mentor. The student body impressed him immensely.
“They want to be involved, to be part of the equation and part of the solution,” he said. “And they’re ready to accept responsibility that when a solution is found, they will be part of selling it.”
For now, Standifird said he is not sure of the specifics of how the money will transform the school, which has about 1,000 undergraduate and 300 MBA students as well as some students earning degrees in accounting. The Class of 2015 had a 99 percent placement rate.
Experiential learning runs through the undergraduate experience, he said. Freshman year, everyone participates in a business competition, and sophomore year they launch their business. Students help manage a $2 million university endowment fund as well as an insurance company, and there is now talk of starting a student-run marketing firm. Internships are a key part of every student's education.
The Lacy School of Business “is and will continue to be an environment in which new ideas are constantly being developed,” Standifird said. “This gift will allow us to really push the boundaries of what it means to be an experiential business school.”
Where other business schools may focus on theory, Butler students place an emphasis on collaborating with one another and becoming involved with projects from the ground up, Lacy said.
Butler “makes the difference between knowing the ‘what’ and understanding the ‘how,’ he said. “And let me assure you from all my many years of experience, there is a significant difference between the two.”
Lacy, a pilot who last summer rode his motorcycle from Moscow to Hong Kong, said that for his part there is one thing he expects to derive from his partnership with Butler: the excitement of watching the next generation of Indiana’s business leaders.
“I also hope the fruits of their work plants seeds of inspiration that spur a cascade of motivation and daring that span generation after generation,” he said.
Call IndyStar reporter Shari Rudavsky at (317) 444-6354. Follow her on Twitter: @srudavsky.