# Oglethorpe University

Oglethorpe University is an Endowment / Foundation based in Atlanta, United States.

## Overview

- **Organization type:** Endowment / Foundation
- **Headquarters:** Atlanta, United States
- **Region:** North America
- **Address:** 4484 Peachtree Rd NE, Brookhaven, GA 30319, United States
- **Founded:** 1835
- **Assets under management:** $46M (Altss estimate)
- **Website:** oglethorpe.edu

## Regulatory record

- **Reports private funds:** No

## About

Oglethorpe University was founded in 1835 and named for James Edward Oglethorpe, the British general who established the colony of Georgia. Located on a 100-acre campus in Brookhaven, just north of Atlanta, the institution operates as a private liberal-arts college enrolling roughly 1,500 students. Behind its academic mission sits a modest endowment pool — Altss estimates roughly $46M — managed under the oversight of an Investment Committee embedded within the Board of Trustees. The endowment, while not publicly detailing its asset allocation, functions as a perpetual funding source for scholarships, faculty chairs, and campus operations. A transformative moment arrived in 2022, when alumnus Q. William 'Bill' Hammack Jr., former president of C.W. Matthews Contracting Co., committed $50M — a gift that essentially doubled or more the pre-existing endowment corpus. The board's leadership reflects deep Georgia corporate ties: Chair S. Tammy Pearson serves as Vice President and Assistant General Counsel at Chick-fil-A, while Vice Chair Cody Partin runs the Cox Family Office, linking the university's governance directly to two of Atlanta's most prominent private enterprises. Additional trustee expertise includes former KPMG Managing Partner Milford McGuirt on the Investment Committee. The Hammack gift anchors Oglethorpe's current financial posture, yet the endowment remains an order of magnitude smaller than similarly aged peers. The university also stewards unconventional assets including the Crypt of Civilization, a sealed time capsule housed in Phoebe Hearst Hall and recognized by the International Time Capsule Society, headquartered on campus. Oglethorpe's structural differentiator is the adjacency of its endowment governance to operating-company and family-office capital allocators. The board is not populated by academics alone — it includes multigenerational Atlanta business families (Cox, through Partin) and the legal leadership of one of the nation's largest private restaurant chains (Chick-fil-A, through Pearson). This creates an unusual posture for a sub-$50M endowment: investment committee members who see deal flow from the allocator side in their day jobs, potentially compressing the principal-agent gap that plagues many small college portfolios.

## Sectors

- Education

## People

- S. Tammy Pearson — Chair of the Board of Trustees
- Cody Partin — Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees
- Milford McGuirt — Trustee and Investment Committee member

## Questions

### Who runs investment decisions at Oglethorpe University's endowment?

The endowment is governed by the Board of Trustees' Investment Committee. Milford McGuirt, a retired KPMG Managing Partner, serves on that committee, per the firm's official communications. The board as a whole is chaired by S. Tammy Pearson (Vice President and Assistant General Counsel at Chick-fil-A) and vice-chaired by Cody Partin (President of Cox Family Office), placing allocator-level expertise directly in the oversight chain.

### How does Oglethorpe's endowment compare in size to other liberal-arts endowments?

At an Altss-estimated $46M, Oglethorpe's endowment is significantly smaller than many liberal-arts peers. For reference, comparably-aged Southern colleges like Davidson or Furman hold endowments in the high hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars. The $50M Hammack gift in 2022 represented a step-change increase but left the pool at a scale where investment strategy is more comparable to a large family office than a major institutional fund.

### How is Oglethorpe's board governance connected to Atlanta's business community?

The Board of Trustees ties directly into Atlanta's corporate and family-office ecosystem. Chair Tammy Pearson is a senior attorney at Chick-fil-A. Vice Chair Cody Partin runs the Cox Family Office — the private wealth vehicle of the Cox Enterprises family. Trustee Milford McGuirt brings Big Four audit-firm perspective from his tenure as a KPMG managing partner. This governance model embeds capital-allocation and operating-company sensibilities unusual for a small college.

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Last updated: 2026-08-11T02:43:31.692Z

Canonical page: https://altss.com/profile/oglethorpe-university

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