Article by Ryan Mulligan – Reporter, Philadelphia Business Journal
Featured in the Philadelphia Business Journal on March 17, 2025
Rob and Kathy Siegfried are both graduates of the University of Delaware. Photo Credit: Evan Krape
The University of Delaware’s business school has received a $71.5 million gift from the founder of Wilmington accounting and advisory firm Siegfried Group and his wife.
The gift from Robert L. Siegfried Jr., Kathleen Marie Siegfried — along with the Siegfried Group — is the largest in the University of Delaware’s 282-year history. The money will help fund the planned Siegfried Hall, a new academic building for the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics that will have classrooms, research labs, a student run cafe and an auditorium.
The gift dwarfs the University of Delaware’s prior record gift of $25 million from Endo Pharmaceuticals founder Carol Ammon and Marie Pinizzotto, the executive director of the Carol A. Ammon Foundation.
The Siegfrieds are University of Delaware alumni who previously gifted more than $6 million to school. Their donations have supported the Siegfried Youth Leadership Initiative and the Siegfried Fellows program.
Robert Siegfried founded the Siegfried Group in 1988 after spending seven years at Ernst and Young. The firm, where he is CEO, now has 1,300 employees in 18 offices across the U.S. including at One Commerce Square in Philadelphia and its headquarters on Market Street in Wilmington.
Within Siegfried Hall will be the Siegfried Institute for Leadership and Free Enterprise. Plans for the building also include a student success center for advising and career services, experiential learning spaces and tech-forward meeting spaces. The university has a goal of breaking ground on the new building within the next four years and is commissioning the design process for the project this spring, with its exact location on campus to be announced.
The Siegfried gift will serve as a match for future gifts for Siegfried Hall in an attempt to catalyze investment into the building.
Robert Siegfried said in a statement they “hope to share a vision and establish a mission that others will feel compelled to both support and follow.”
The Lerner College is the second largest business school in Greater Philadelphia with 3,365 undergraduate students and 792 graduate students across five departments.
Siegfried Hall will join a list of other projects taking shape in Newark after the recent opened of its $180 million “Building X” academic project. It is also continuing to build out its Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus, a 272-acre innovation focused campus redevelopment on the site of a former Chrysler automotive plant in Newark. There it has about a million square feet of real estate projects in use or under construction, with a master plan ultimately calling for six to seven million square feet of new buildings.
