The Duke Endowment's $80 million gift to Duke University for a series of construction projects is the largest in school history.

It supplants another Duke Endowment gift at the top of the list - a $75 million gift in 2005 towards a financial aid initiative.

Other big gifts to Duke include:

• $70 million from Peter Nicholas in 2003 to the Nicholas School of the Environment
• $50 million from the Duke Endowment in 2008 for two uses - $35 million for a medical educational facility and $15 million for a pediatric care facility.
• $46.5 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006 to accelerate the development of an HIV vaccine.
• $40 million from the Duke Endowment in 2007 for a strategic faculty initiative.

Duke University announced the largest private gift in its history - an $80 million donation from the Duke Endowment.

The gift - $10 million of which has already been delivered, the balanced pledged over coming years - will pay for renovations to three campus meeting and performance spaces.

They are the West Union and Page Auditorium on Duke's West Campus, and Baldwin Auditorium on East Campus.

These are projects Duke would not have been able to pay for were it not for the largesse of the Duke Endowment, the private philanthropic organization established by James B. Duke, said a very grateful Richard Brodhead, Duke's president, following the gift announcement Monday.

"The university is committed to insurinmg the highest quality of experience to students," Brodhead said.

Collectively, the three renovation projects aim to create better meeting spaces for students, faculty and staff. Page and Baldwin are performance venues while the West Union houses restaurants and meeting spaces.

Brodhead promises a startling transformation that will retain the historic character of each building while making a quantum leap forward in terms of modernization and utility.

"We'll have to take 'before' and 'after' pictures of the sites," he said. "Because people will take the 'after' for granted."

Read more on this in Tuesday's News & Observer.

Duke University's endowment lost more than 24 percent of its value last year.

Duke, like major research institutions across the nation, was hit hard by the recession last year. The endowment lost 24.3 percent of its value and is now worth $4.4 billion, according to this new report.

With less money to pull from its endowment for operational costs, Duke officials spent much of the last year looking for ways to ease, over three years, a $125 million budget shortfall.

They did so in part by offering incentives for workers to retire and by freezing construction projects.