The University of Texas at Tyler University Advancement

2010 Inspiring Excellence Award Winners

2010 is the inaugural year for the UT Tyler Inspiring Excellence Awards.  This award is to recognize and thank those who have given extraordinary measures of their time, influence, energy and love to our University.  With this award, we recognize these people who love UT Tyler, work hard as volunteers on our behalf, and who may be dedicted ambassadors beyond UT Tyler.  We value these people so much!

 

Herb Buie

 

No one in our community has made it his mission in life to serve so many of the wonderful non-profit institutions and organizations in our area as Herb Buie. Herb wears so many volunteer leadership "hats" in the Tyler area that he may already be out of closet space to hang those hats! When Dub Riter passed away in 2003, he left a major volunteer leadership void here at UT Tyler. Herb stepped into that void and took over for his late and greatly admired friend to become our next Development Board Chair - a leadership role that he ably played until 2008 when his term ended.

Herb remains a vital leader at UT Tyler as a member of not only our UT Tyler Development Board, but also as a member of the Executive Committee of that Board. He and his devoted wife of more than 60 years, Melvina, are deeply involved with this institution as donors as well. They have made a significant commitment to our Inspiring Excellence Campaign and have established a Nursing Doctoral Scholarship.

Additionally, Herb and Melvina continue to philanthropically support the Cowan Center Performance Excellence Endowment, President's Associates, the Patriot Golf Classic, Friends of the Arts and our athletics program at UT Tyler. In fact, it is not unusual for Herb to personally raise and solicit over 50% of the President’s Associates funds!

Herb and Melvina are our #1 baseball fans. Herb, at least, has never missed a baseball game since we began the program and Melvina has attended nearly all of them as well.

 

Palestine Trio: Cad Williams, David Barnard and Phil Jenkins

    

These gentlemen turned what some may have thought a pipe dream into reality. Using forward thinking from the beginning, they enlisted then state representative, Todd Staples, to help obtain $6.3 Million in Tuition Revenue Bonds and $700,000 provided by UT System for a new building on the Palestine Campus. With community support high, they conceived and ran a $2.6 Million philanthropic campaign to provide the remainder needed for the new building. The Paving the Way campaign funds were also used to purchase 48 acres of land, which were in turn conveyed to UT Tyler. They then worked with the City of Palestine to have them donate approx. 3 acres that bordered the 48 purchased acres, in order to “square it up”.

Each gave hundreds, if not thousands, of volunteer hours over the past four or more years in this quest. Each made their own early gift commitments to the project as well.

All three serve unselfishly on the Palestine Development Council Executive Committee, early on marshalling the forces of this hard-working council, whose motto could well be “If it’s good for Palestine, it’s good for us”.

These men are true believers in the importance of higher education in Palestine, Anderson County, and the surrounding region, believers in the importance of UT Tyler to that goal and believers in the value of hard work as volunteers to make the dream come true.

For the record, both Cad and Phil are UT Austin grads. David, though, is an Aggie and used his alum status to recruit other local Aggies as donors!!

 

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University Advancement
The University of Texas at Tyler
  3900 University Blvd.
     Tyler, TX 75799
 903.566.7110
advancement@uttyler.edu