Gordon W Davis

Gordon W. Davis, a Lubbock businessman who spent 10 years as an associate professor at Texas Tech University and his wife, Joyce, have given a $44 million donation to rename the Gordon W. Davis College of Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources and further support a program he helped bring into the national spotlight. To honor this generosity, Texas Tech is renaming the college the Gordon W. Davis College of Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources, said Tech President Lawrence Schovanec. Davis, who earned bachelor’s degrees in agriculture science and education from Washington State University and a doctorate in meat science from Texas A&M University, spent the early part of his career as an instructor and faculty member at several colleges, according to news release from Tech. He began as a high school instructor in the late 1960s and later was an instructor at Texas A&M while finishing his master’s and doctorate requirements. He then spent three years on the faculty at the University of Tennessee and 10 years at Texas Tech. In 1990, he left to enter the private sector. During his time in academia, he coached two national champion meat judging teams, at Texas A&M in 1973 and Texas Tech in 1989 – that would be the first of what is now 16 meat judging national championships in Lubbock. Recognizing a need for enhanced instructional material, in 1984 Davis entered the entrepreneurial world and established CEV Multimedia, which started out producing multimedia textbooks for curricula.