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Giving While Living: The Legacy of Chuck Feeney at Cornell and Beyond
February 5 – March 24, 2026
Michael T. Sillerman ’68 Rotunda
Rare and Manuscript Collections, 2B Kroch Library
Please join us for an opening reception and exhibition tour on Thursday, February 5, at 4:00pm.
Running across Cornell’s Ithaca campus, East Avenue was renamed Feeney Way to honor the university’s most generous donor, Charles F. “Chuck” Feeney ’56, at an official unveiling on his 90th birthday on April 23, 2021. To those familiar with Feeney’s decades of anonymous philanthropy, the public marker might have come as a surprise. For others, this remarkable alumnus who’s been praised as the “third founder of Cornell” and the “James Bond of philanthropy” remains a mystery: Who was Chuck Feeney?
A graduate of Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, Feeney made his fortune by co-founding Duty Free Shoppers in 1961. Inspired by Andrew Carnegie, he devoted his life to “giving while living”—a philosophy that would guide his foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, for almost 40 years. In addition to Feeney’s extraordinary philanthropy, his personal contributions to ending the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland played a major role in the ratification of the Good Friday Peace Agreement.
Organized by Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, this exhibition draws from the Charles F. Feeney Papers and the Atlantic Philanthropies Archives to illuminate Feeney’s philanthropic legacy at Cornell and around the world. The exhibition also marks the release of a new edition of Conor O’Clery’s biography, The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune, which was updated after Feeney’s death in 2023.