LV broadcaster donates $50 million to UA law school

Wednesday, Sept. 9, 1998 | 11:09 a.m.

Rogers, owner of Sunbelt Communications Co., a Las Vegas firm that operates eight television stations including KVBC, committed $20 million in April to the college of law, the largest gift ever to any American law school.

His earlier donation, to start in 1999 and provide $2.5 million annually through 2008, was intended to help expand the law school's facilities, provide for scholarships and improve its library.

The new gift will be paid out over 20 years beginning in January, with the money to be concentrated on expanding the school's programs and adding faculty members.

A stipulation of his gift is that it ends if the college's operating budget or other assets are reduced because of the new donations.

The college will be renamed the James E. Rogers College of Law.

"There are few times in the life of a university when a single person changes the future of the institution forever," UA President Peter Likins said. "James Rogers is such a person."

In an interview Tuesday, Rogers explained why he increased the size of his gift. "First of all, I had the capacity to do it," he said. "Secondly, I think there was a need for the additional amount."

Rogers, whose law school education cost him $3,000, has a net worth reputed to be comfortably in excess of $300 million, though he declined to disclose it.

He was graduated from Arizona's law school in 1962 and then obtained a master in law from the University of Southern California. After teaching for a year at the University of Illinois law school, Rogers had a highly successful law practice in Las Vegas from 1964 to 1988. Since then he has been owner and president of Sunbelt Communications, which operates TV stations in five western states.

He said his experiences at Southern California and Illinois led him to believe that Arizona's law faculty could compete with both schools. In fact, the Arizona College of Law, with only a $9 million budget annually, "can do really great things with another 20 to 50 percent, and has the ability to become a great regional law school with UCLA, USC, Stanford and Berkeley," he said.

Rogers, whose mother taught second grade for 40 years in Las Vegas, has made numerous other gifts and pledges to educational institutions in Nevada and other Western states.

"It's a very exciting thing," Rogers said. "It's a helluva lot more fun to give it while you're living than to leave it in an estate."

"This is transformative," said Joel Seligman, dean of the law school. "This is so much money over a 20-year period that all of us in this college of law anticipate that we'll not need to seek a tuition increase over the life of his pledge."

That would be the equivalent to a scholarship for every student who attends the law school in the future years of Rogers' gift, Seligman said.

Since 1993-94, the university's law school tuition has increased from $1,800 to $5,000. That's still only one-third to one-fourth the cost to attend some of the nation's top public law schools.

"In effect it means we'll have a school where tuition levels will stand still for the future and the school can get better and better," Seligman said.