Donor Story
Real Estate + Deed Transfer = Faculty Support
By Chandra Harris-McCray
Libba Wall, pictured with her husband, James Wall, honored her son, Jimmy Dudley, a UT architecture graduate, by supporting the College of Architecture and Design with a generous real estate gift to establish an endowment through the Chancellor’s Faculty Salary Support Challenge. A catalyst to retain and recruit outstanding faculty, the challenge, which offers immediate access to funding on all new gifts and five-year pledges, has already made a transformative impact in a number of colleges, including social work, engineering, and business administration.
As soon as Jimmy Dudley could walk he fetched Legos and built imaginary buildings.
His drawings, modeled after the spec houses that his father built, were anything but ordinary child’s play of one-dimensional crayon houses and stick people.
By the fourth grade, after visiting a construction site with his father, Dudley claimed his career path as an architect.
This came as no surprise to his mother, Libba Wall (UTK ’59), who always knew her son was destined to change the skyline of cities. Any time he put his hands on an Erector Set “or any toy for that matter,” he was prone to build something.
After graduating from the architecture program at the University of Tennessee in 1986, Dudley went on to work for architecture firms in Boston and New York before receiving his master’s degree in architecture from the University of Virginia.
Now principal of his own firm, Dudley Architecture & Planning, in Charlotte, N.C., Dudley has a deeper appreciation for how UT molded his dream into reality.
“The many sleepless nights that I spent in the architecture building at UT still helps me shape the world we live in,” he says.
Inspired by her son’s passion and tenacity, Wall honored Dudley by establishing an endowment in the College of Architecture and Design through the Chancellor’s Faculty Salary Support Challenge. A catalyst to retain and recruit outstanding faculty, the challenge, which offers immediate access to funding on all new gifts and five-year pledges, has made a transformative impact in a number of colleges, including nursing, engineering, and business administration.
“I did not know that I could give a gift of real estate to the university,” explains Wall, who also supports the Lady Vols. “But once I did my research and worked with the staff in the planned giving office it was a seamless process that allowed me to not only honor my son, but professors.
“A child’s dream can be dreamed, but if he or she does not have a teacher to shape and mold that dream, it dies,” explains Wall. “Teachers give flight to the what-ifs and maybes.”
She says, “This gift honors those professors who believed in my son, and those professors who are honing the dreams of students day after day.”
“It is such a priceless gift,” says Scott Wall, who is the stepson of Wall and the director of the School of Architecture in the College of Architecture. “This gift honors the compassion and capabilities of great faculty, who foster a spirit of curiosity among students and create a foundation for life-long learning and creative thinking.
“There is nothing else remotely like this in the school.”