Why they give: John and Nancy Burkoff
Law school faculty members John and Nancy Burkoff are husband and wife and have been giving to Pitt’s internal campaign, separately and together, for a long time.
John has been on the faculty for 38 years; Nancy has been on the faculty for seven years, but she previously was a Pitt law adjunct professor for many years and is a Pitt law school graduate.
With 29 consecutive years of giving, they have contributed money to a wide variety of Pitt initiatives: student activities and student printing; the law school and its fellows; the Panther Club Athletic Scholarship Fund; the Lancaster Award for Public Interest; the Pitt Law Locker Initiative; the Dr. Joan G. Gaines Breast Cancer Fund, and the Bob Donnorummo Study Abroad Fund.
“We are both proud and pleased to be members of the Pitt faculty,” says John, “and it seems to us that it is good to put our money where our mouths are.” Sometimes the help is as simple as giving profits from the sales of books the couple has written, which their students are now using, to the student printing fund.
“We’re proud of the way the University has grown and changed since we first came here,” says Nancy, noting that the couple has raised two children and taken them to Pitt football and basketball games.
The pair of profs has used their donations to honor everyone from a local federal court judge to the longtime head of Russian and Eastern European studies here at Pitt.
“The things that we have contributed to,” says John, “are things that we believe in, and there is no reason to believe that we will stop.”