We may be in a recession, but that hasn’t stopped some donors from making big gifts to universities. In the last two weeks, Mizzou has announced two major gifts — a $2 million gift to the school of medicine and a $1 million gift to the music program.

The $2 million gift from Tom and Anne Smith to the School of Medicine was announced today. The money will go towards scholarships to help students in the newly-named Tom and Anne Smith MD-PhD Program who want to become physician-scientists.

The school says that this more formalized program will help ensure that more physicians have the academic training to apply new scientific discoveries into patient care. MD-PhD programs combine the traditional four years of medical school with the three to four years typically required to earn a PhD.

“Students who complete MD-PhD programs are well-equipped to understand the significance of scientific discoveries,” said Dr. Robert Churchill, interim dean of the medical school, in a statement. “They can then move faster than many others to develop tests that determine whether the discoveries can be given safely to humans and provide effective treatments for patients.”

There are currently 9 students in Mizzou’s MD-PhD program. Natalie Fieleke, a medical school spokeswoman, said the size of individual scholarship awards have not yet been determined.

The second gift — the $1 million to the school of music by Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield — was announced last week. It will help fund scholarships for student composers and a graduate-level new music ensemble that will perform in non-traditional venues around campus and the state in order to attract new audiences to new music. It will also fund a summer composition festival for college and graduate students.

“There are so many talented young composers, but there is a lack of public funding for programs and scholarships to support them,” Jeanne Sinquefield, who plays the double bass in three mid-Missouri orchestras, said in a statement. “I have heard young composers say that they actually hear their music before they write it. That kind of talent is incredible and should be encouraged and supported.”

Both gifts are part of the For All We Call Mizzou billion-dollar campaign, which ended in December. Emily Smith, a university spokeswoman, said that the paperwork for the gifts were submitted before the end of the campaign, but the public announcements were not made until a couple months later to accommodate the schedules of the donors.

Mizzou isn’t the only one making big gift announcements recently. UMSL unveiled last month that Anheuser-Busch Foundation has pledged $2.5 million over the next five years towards a new business administration building.

So I guess there’s some good news out there in an otherwise bleak economic landscape.

The Grade is the St. Louis region’s premier blog on education and child welfare. To read other recent posts, go to www.stltoday.com/thegrade.