McNair Invests $17.5 Million in Shaping Business Leaders at Rice

CONTACT: Terry Shepard

PHONE: (713)
737-6280

E-MAIL: tshepard@rice.edu

McNair Invests $17.5 Million in Shaping Business Leaders at
Rice

Cogen Founder’s Gift Meant to Power Jones School of
Management

Into National Leadership

Robert C. McNair, the Houston
entrepreneur who built Cogen Technologies into the world’s largest privately
owned cogenerator of electricity and thermal energy, is making a major
investment in the production of a different kind of power—the sort that will
shape the economy of the future.

McNair and his wife, Janice, have made one of the largest gifts
ever by individuals to Rice University—$17.5 million to the Jesse H. Jones
Graduate School of Management, the university announced today.

”Rice University is one of the premier schools in the country,
and it will only be a short time before the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of
Management attains a similar stature among graduate business schools,” Bob
McNair said. ”The city of Houston and the entire southwestern United States will
benefit from the contributions a premier graduate business school, such as the
Jones School, can make to our business community.

”Janice and I are proud to be a part of the Rice University
community and to assist the Jones School as it takes a giant step
forward.”

Said Rice President Malcolm Gillis, himself an economist: ”We
expect that this major investment in the Jones School will allow the McNairs and
Rice University to cogenerate business leaders, research and teaching vital for
Houston, the region and the nation in the 21st Century.

”The McNairs have a keen appreciation of how the Jones
School—joined with Rice’s strengths in engineering and the social sciences, and
our expanding collaborations with the Texas Medical Center—intends to rise to
the topmost ranks of the nation’s business schools.”

Gilbert R. Whitaker, dean of Rice’s Jones School, said that the
McNairs’ gift would make possible new facilities and programs that leverage
Rice’s strengths.

”Bob is very interested in bringing innovations and technology
developed at universities such as Rice to the marketplace,” Whitaker said. ”As a
member of the Rice Board of Trustees, he understands that the Jones School can
be a very important catalyst in this process through the development of concepts
and ideas, as well as leaders, for established and emerging businesses and
industries. This major investment by the McNairs in the Jones School will
markedly enhance our ability to serve the Houston business community and its
world wide markets.”

McNair, 62, founded Cogen Technologies in 1984, and as CEO led
it to become one of the world’s largest cogeneration companies. Its
natural-gas-fired plants—such as those in New Jersey that supply about 13 per
cent of New York City’s electricity—set a standard for the East Coast in high
efficiency and environmental cleanliness. In 1999, Enron Corp., one of the
world’s leading electricity, natural gas and communications companies, purchased
a majority of Cogen’s assets.

A wide-ranging civic leader, McNair is senior chairman of the
Board of Trustees of the Houston Grand Opera Association, and a member of the
boards of Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine, the Houston Museum of
Fine Arts and the Greater Houston Partnership. He was elected to the Texas
Business Hall of Fame in 1997. McNair also is prominent in sporting circles,
leading a group seeking to bring a National Football League franchise to
Houston. Under the colors of Stonerside Stable, McNair and his wife breed and
race thoroughbred horses, including Touch Gold, winner of the 1997 Belmont
Stakes; Coronado’s Quest, one of 1998’s top three-year-olds; and Chilukki, this
year’s leading two-year-old filly.

In 1988, the McNairs established the Janice and Robert McNair
Foundation which has focused on education. The McNairs’ past gifts for education
include funding to endow the chair of the director of the James A. Baker III
Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. Other significant gifts were
made to Baylor College of Medicine to endow the McNair Scholars M.D./Ph.D.
program; endowing the McNairs Scholars program at the University of South
Carolina, where Bob McNair earned his bachelor’s degree in 1958 and received an
honorary doctor of humane letters degree in 1999; to Columbia College, Janice
McNair’s alma mater, to fund construction of the Barbara Bush Center for Science
and Technology; to fund numerous education initiatives for inner city youth in
Houston; and for a scholarship program in Forest City, N.C., where Bob McNair
attended high school.

Their latest gift to Rice is a major boost to the university’s
comprehensive reshaping of the Jones School of Management. Since coming to Rice
two years ago from the University of Michigan, Whitaker has launched an
executive MBA program, increased faculty size and depth in critical and emerging
disciplines, led a revamping of the curriculum, and initiated forward-looking
management education programs.

Rice University, on the nation’s third coast and in its
fourth-largest city, in early August was named by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
Magazine as the best value in the nation among private universities. Rice is a
leading research university distinguished by its selectivity, superior teaching,
small size, individual attention, and collaborative and interdisciplinary
culture.

###