LITTLE ROCK — The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville will use a combined $1 million in private gifts to fund a new display featuring Wal-Mart Stores Inc. founder Sam Walton in the building that houses the college of business that bears his name.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation made separate $500,000 donations to the project, campus officials announced Monday.
The current exhibit honoring Walton is a single display case that is “tucked into a dark area in a stairwell” on the second floor of UA’s Business Administration Building, said Dan Worrell, dean of the Sam M. Walton College of Business.
The new display will showcase Sam Walton memorabilia spanning three levels of the building’s central stairway and atrium space, Worrell said.
The location will be in the heart of the Business Administration Building, he said.
“What we currently have is a traditional display case, something like if you went into a high school and viewed trophies,” Worrell said. “It has some interesting items in it. Though a lot of people do see it, it’s not that prominent.”
The new tribute to Walton is “more fitting of his significance,” he said.
Walton founded the Bentonville-based retail giant in 1962 with a single store in Rogers. By the time of his death in 1992, the chain had grown to 1,735 stores stretching across 43 states. Today Wal-Mart has stores around the globe and is the world’s largest retailer by revenue.
Walton’s success made him one of the wealthiest people in America and his family the richest in the country.
“He is our namesake, and our students and visitors will be able to have more of an awareness about the man,” Worrell said. “So we’re very excited about it.”
Worrell is stepping down as dean June 30 and returning to the faculty after serving as the college’s leader since 2005.The project will begin as early as this week, and the hope is it will be completed by the start of classes in mid-August.
Worrell said he got the idea for a new Walton exhibit after visiting the National World War II Museum in New Orleans in January 2011.
“My wife and I toured the museum and really thought it was first-rate, and it got me thinking about our display forour namesake,” Worrell said.
His “personal dream,” Worrell said, was to create a display that would coincide with the opening of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville - founded by Walton’s daughter, Alice - and the newly revamped and expanded Wal-Mart Visitors Center on the Bentonville square, also known as Walton’s Five and Dime.
The visitors center reopened a year ago, and the museum opened in November.
Walton’s heirs are UA’s top private benefactors, said Brad Choate, vice chancellor for university advancement.
The Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation, which focuses on colleges and universities in Arkansas and community foundations and trusts in Arkansas and surrounding states, is notable for two historic gifts made to UA.
In 2002, it made a $300 million gift that still is the single largest gift to an American public university and the fifthlargest to any university, public or private.
In 1998, it gave $50 million to the university’s business college that led to the naming of what is now the Sam M. Walton College of Business.
Arkansas, Pages 24 on 05/23/2012