Philanthropist Irwin “Ike” Belk has established a distinguished professorship at the University of North Carolina Wilmington to recruit and retain outstanding faculty for the School of Nursing.

The Charlotte, N.C., business executive and higher education advocate provided a major gift, enabling the university to receive matching funds from the C.D. Spangler Foundation of Charlotte and North Carolina's Distinguished Professors Endowment Trust Fund, to endow the Irwin “Ike” Belk Distinguished Professorship at $1 million.

“We are profoundly grateful to Ike Belk for his generous gift,” Chancellor Rosemary DePaolo said. “UNCW is working hard to address the critical nursing shortage in North Carolina, and this professorship will help us recruit an outstanding nursing professional to teach and mentor our students. This position will further strengthen our highly qualified and accomplished nursing faculty.”

A generous contributor to higher education in North Carolina, Belk is a former state senator who also served two terms on the UNC Board of Governors and was appointed a U.S. delegate to the 54th United Nations General Assembly. He is the chief executive officer of the Belk Group, Inc.

His other philanthropic interests include the U.S. Olympic Committee, which awarded him the Olympic Order in 2002, and the American Cancer Society Foundation, which presented him with its highest honor, the Merit Award, that same year.

“I am very pleased to help UNCW recruit outstanding nursing faculty,” Belk said. He has been an advocate for the university since the 1960s, when he and other state leaders worked to expand the University of North Carolina system. UNCW joined the system in 1969.

With Belk’s gift, UNCW benefits from challenge grants the C.D. Spangler Foundation created in 2007 that provide $26.9 million from the foundation to support the creation of up to 96 distinguished professorships within the University of North Carolina system. The North Carolina General Assembly approved $14 million in matching funds for the new distinguished professorships.

According to Virginia W. Adams, dean of the UNCW School of Nursing, universities nationwide have difficulty recruiting nursing faculty – there are many open positions and limited numbers of educators – and retaining them because they receive better employment offers outside the field of education.

“The very best nursing educators have many career opportunities available to them – from high-profile positions with leading medical centers to private industry options – that provide higher salaries and more flexible schedules than teaching at a university,” she said. “With funds from the Belk Distinguished Professorship in Nursing, UNCW can offer a leading educator a competitive salary and resources to conduct research.”

The more nursing faculty the university recruits, the more students it may accept into its nursing programs, she added.

“Nursing faculty are the key to solving the nursing shortage in North Carolina,” Adams said. “The number of students that we may accept is directly related to the number of faculty we have. Unfortunately, this year we had to turn away one-third of the students eligible for admission to our nursing program because we did not have enough educators available. That’s why Mr. Belk’s gift is so critical.”

Belk’s contributions to UNC Wilmington include Belk Hall, a women’s residence hall named for his mother, Mary Lenora Irwin Belk, and Bryan Auditorium in Morton Hall. He recently commissioned a Seahawk statue for the UNCW campus. Work is underway to design and develop the statue by sculptor Jon Hair of Cornelius, N.C.

Media Contacts:

Virginia Adams, Dean, UNCW School of Nursing, 910.962.7410 or adamsv@uncw.edu