University of Illinois Chicago’s pharmacy school is getting a new name, after receiving a $36 million endowment gift from the estate of late Chicago pharmacy owners Herbert and Carol Retzky.
The pharmacy school — which will now be called the Herbert M. and Carol H. Retzky College of Pharmacy — is the first college at UIC to be named after a donor.
The donation is the largest ever received by the pharmacy college. It was given to the college as an endowment, meaning the money will be invested to generate income to be used by the college. That income will go toward merit-based scholarships for students and career development programs.
“Their passion was really to help our students,” Glen Schumock, dean of the pharmacy college, said of the Retzkys. “They understood the financial needs of students these days and how difficult it is. They were really passionate about helping out the next generation of pharmacists.”
Herbert Retzky died in 2017 and his wife, Carol, died in 2019. They previously donated $8 million to the college.
They were both raised in the pharmacy business; both of their fathers were pharmacists, Schumock said. Herbert Retzky followed in his father’s footsteps, graduating from University of Illinois Chicago’s pharmacy school in 1946.
After Herbert Retzky’s father died, the couple took over his South Side pharmacy. They then sold that pharmacy, and opened a pharmacy on the city’s West Side, which they ran for decades, said Elaine Levin, a longtime friend, attorney and trustee of their trust estates.
The couple worked side by side, with Herbert Retzky as pharmacist and Carol Retzky as a pharmacy technician and bookkeeper, Levin said.
The pair were also keen stock market investors, she said.
“They loved investing and charting stocks,” Levin said. “They were basically charting stocks way back when, before you could do this easily on computers, and they were very good.”
The couple named the pharmacy college as a beneficiary of their estate, she said, and she and Schumock worked out the details in recent years of how the money would be used. They came up with a plan they felt would help propel the pharmacy school into the future and satisfy the Retzkys’ goals of helping to expand the pharmacy profession, Levin said.
“These scholarships will allow us to sort of guarantee we’ll have a strong pipeline of students,” Schumock said.
UIC’s pharmacy college is one of the oldest pharmacy colleges in the country. It was founded 165 years ago, on Sept. 12, 1859.