Every Sunday morning of Roland Parrish’s childhood began with the same arithmetic. His parents gave him seventy cents, in exact change: two quarters and two dimes. One quarter went to the church. One quarter went to the piggy bank. A dime was for Sunday school, and a dime was his to spend.
Fifty years after he graduated from Purdue University, the portions have gotten larger. Parrish has committed $42 million to his alma mater, the largest gift from an individual for a facility in Purdue’s history. The money names the new flagship building of the Mitch Daniels School of Business, which opens in fall 2027 as the Roland G. Parrish Hall of Business. Unlike the anonymous donor who gave Centre College $225 million this fall, Parrish put his name on it, and he has opinions about who should walk through the doors.
“Not to be a smart aleck, but it’s something I can afford,” he told the Lafayette Journal & Courier.
From a track scholarship to 27 restaurants
Parrish grew up in Hammond, Indiana, the son of the Rev. John Parrish and his wife, Marie, in a Black neighborhood shaped by the steel mills. He first noticed Purdue in September 1968, when Boilermaker halfback Leroy Keyes appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, a magazine Parrish bought with money earned delivering papers and playing piano in church. He arrived in West Lafayette in 1971 on a full athletic scholarship, ran track for four varsity letters and two team MVP awards, and left with a bachelor’s degree in industrial management in 1975 and a master’s in management in 1976.
After thirteen years at Exxon, he tried to become a McDonald’s franchise owner and was turned down on his first attempt. He opened his first restaurant in Dallas in 1989 and built the business to 27 locations over three decades, one of the largest minority-owned McDonald’s organizations in the country. He has since sold all but four, choosing buyers he trusted to take care of his employees.
“Everything I have accomplished professionally began with the foundation I received at Purdue,” Parrish said in the university’s announcement. “Supporting Purdue has always been deeply personal because I know firsthand the difference this institution can make in a student’s life.”
The second building with his name
Parrish Hall will be a 164,000-square-foot building, Purdue’s second-largest classroom building in West Lafayette, with labs for financial trading, data visualization, and behavioral research. It is not the first room on campus that carries his name. In 2010 he gave $2 million to renovate what is now the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management and Economics, the first major campus facility named for a Black alumnus. He calls that gift his most satisfying until this one.
His eye for the grounds came from his Exxon and McDonald’s years, where landscaping was part of the discipline. He has asked Purdue to plant a grove of commemorative trees for four men who shaped him: his mentor Cornell Bell, who ran the university’s Business Opportunity Program; Ronald Fruitt, a vice president for housing and food service; John Day, a former business dean; and David Rankin, his head track coach. “It’s just got to appear to be an oasis,” he said. “We want to make the landscaping ‘wow.’ W-O-W.”
Purdue interim President Mitch Daniels, whose own name is on the school Parrish’s hall will house, put the gift plainly: “Roland Parrish exemplifies what is possible when talent, determination and a Purdue education come together.”
What he asked for besides the naming
While negotiating the gift, Parrish raised programs to recruit and support Black and Hispanic students at Purdue. He left those talks without commitments, but he describes them as positive, and his hope is specific: that Purdue’s enrollment should come closer to the racial makeup of Indiana itself. “Because I think any child born in Indiana should have the opportunity to live the American dream,” he said. “If they can do that at Purdue University, I’d be very satisfied.”
He frames the whole career, the restaurants and the giving alike, as an inheritance from the movement that raised him. “I am a child of the civil rights movement. I remember separate water fountains and restrooms,” he said.
Fifty years out, he is still splitting the allowance the way his parents taught him, a quarter here, a quarter there. His explanation for the largest of the portions is a verse he learned in the church that got the first quarter. “To whom much is given, much is required,” he says. “Luke 12:48.”
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