BB&T Charitable Foundation has given $1 million to Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business.
The money will be used to form a program within the Department of Finance that focuses on capitalism and freedom.
"BB&T has been setting up these programs at a few universities, so we thought that this was a good opportunity for us," said Vijay Singal, department head for finance, insurance and business law.
The college will receive the money in $100,000 payments over a period of 10 years.
Professor Douglas Patterson has already developed two new courses that he is teaching this fall as part of the new program. Patterson's new classes are 'Free Markets and Social Welfare,' a course for undergraduate students, and 'Free Markets and Individual Freedom,' a course for graduate students.
This semester, these courses are only open to business students as a free elective, but they should be expanded to all undergraduates next fall, Patterson said.
Patterson said that both courses are related to free markets because he thinks most people hold incorrect assumptions about what economic system is used in the U.S.
"If you were to take a survey of people on the street, most people, in describing our economy, would say we have a free market economy ... which is not accurate because we have a mixed economy," Patterson said.
He said that some government regulations, such as health care and environmental standards, do not allow the U.S. economy to become a free market.
Patterson said that it is not his point to advocate any individual system, but rather to explain to students the other systems that exist. In doing so, Patterson compares the U.S. economy to Marxism, communism, socialism and fascism in his courses.
Before the grant, students were assumed to have a basic knowledge of other economic systems, but they were not taught as explicitly, Singal said.
"The intent is to examine economic systems and basically educate students on what may be a good system for a country to have," Singal said.
Mark Armagost, director for Corporate and Foundation Relations in University Development at Virginia Tech, said that BB&T requests proposals for this competitive grant, which Tech applied for during the 2006-07 school year.
Tech was notified by BB&T last spring that it had been selected for this grant, Armagost said.