Portales, NM – October 5, 2022 – The Eastern New Mexico University Board of Regents announced Friday, September 30, their intent to rename the Education Building to honor alumna, author, educator, and philanthropist Dr. Gay Su Pinnell. The official rededication of the building will occur later this academic year.
A nationally recognized early childhood literacy education expert, Pinnell has made several transformational gifts to ENMU over the last several years. Her grant to ENMU's Child Development Center on the Portales campus significantly expanded services to two-year-old preschool children, enhancing ENMU students' hands-on learning and providing these children with state-of-the-art instructional materials.
Pinnell's gift of $1 million to fund the Co-Teaching Project in 2021 was an innovative partnership with Portales Schools and ENMU to enhance student-teachers' cooperation with their teacher-supervisors.
"Dr. Pinnell is a truly innovative donor, leveraging her gifts to define brilliant new approaches to improving education," said Patrice Caldwell, ENMU Chancellor. "This is philanthropy with a very high I.Q. She is an extraordinary alumna—a visionary in her field, a role model, and our soulmate. We are honored to have her name on the building that is home to our education program."
The ENMU alumna who grew up in Portales and became a national-renowned early childhood literacy education expert, also purchased the Casa del Sol (House of the Sun) property south of the ENMU campus in October 2017. Pinnell fell in love with the adobe-style home built in 1948, designed by famous Santa Fe architect John Gaw Meem. She had the property completely renovated and donated it to ENMU to serve as a campus event space with two guest apartments for dignitaries.
"Sometimes people say that you go to college to "learn answers." I believe that my time at ENMU was spent learning questions--about life, about worthwhile and successful work, about love, about the world." said Pinnell. "I have pursued those questions all of my life. When I was a young teacher, it didn't occur to me that I could become a philanthropist. But when I discovered that I could, one of my first thoughts was to give back to Eastern--not only where I learned those questions but where I was raised."
The 1966 ENMU alumna was inducted into the ENMU Educator Hall of Honor in 2014 for her exceptional career developing internationally recognized teaching methods in early childhood literacy, named Philanthropist of the Year in 2019 by the ENMU Foundation, and was honored with the Distinguished Serves Award on Oct 1, 2022, by the ENMU Alumni Association.
