We are deeply grateful to dedicated alumni and friends who support the University of Mississippi. Someone once penned the words: "Better than thanksgiving is thanksliving." Please know we are observing "thanksliving" every day by being good stewards of your gifts. We witness your gifts at work in the lives of our students as well as…

Like most parents, Bob and Rita Vasilyev are rarely surprised by the actions of their three adult children. So the Oxford couple was not stunned when the trio committed $130,000 to the University of Mississippi's Department of Nutrition and Hospitality Management, establishing the department's first endowment in their family's name. Instead, Bob Vasilyev, president of…

  Margaret Lewis Draper and her husband, L.C. Draper, were known in South Texas for their longtime support of education. The Ole Miss graduate joined her husband in making many gifts to the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA).   When Margaret Draper of Edinburg, Texas, passed away, she remembered her alma mater with a gift…

Honoring thy mother is a commandment Gordon Thompson has taken to heart. When he decided to establish a scholarship in honor of his mother, who was also an Ole Miss student, Thompson followed the spirit of the commandment to a T.   The $100,000 Claude P. Thompson Ole Miss First Scholarship is for full-time entering…

  For the first seven years of his life, Charles Moore lived in a home with no electricity on a dirt road near Blytheville, Ark. As he matured, he made three goals for his life: to marry a nice young woman, to see the turn of the century, and to do well financially. The 1947…

Kristie and Charles Abney of Atlanta have made a major gift to the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA), an institute of the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture (CSSC), to help meet the goal of endowing a professorship in the growing academic study of foodways. "We made the gift because we are…