Sunapee — A Sunapee resident and Wall Street banker has donated $20 million to his alma mater, Virgina Tech, to fund scholarships and develop an interdisciplinary program to better prepare students for the “innovation economy.”

David Calhoun, a managing director at New York private equity giant Blackstone Group and former top executive of General Electric, made the bequest to the university’s Honors College program, which focuses on educating students to tackle “critical real-world problems.”

Calhoun’s gift is divided into $15 million, which will endow a scholarship fund to provide financial aide to 200 students annually, and $5 million, which will go toward developing an interdisciplinary studies program and establishing the Calhoun Center for Higher Education Innovation, according to the Blacksburg, Va., university.

Calhoun said in an interview he was motivated to make the gift because “all these companies have this wave of technology available to do new and different things, and it requires people who can incorporate different disciplines into solving large, complex problems. It’s no longer just an engineer solving an engineering problem.”

Thanassis Rikakis, a Virgina Tech administrator and researcher who will run the program and Calhoun Center, said Calhoun’s gift will help the university bring business, government and nonprofit leaders to the southern Virginia campus where they will participate in classes and workshops with students.

The innovative program will tap educators in engineering, business and the arts to collaborate with students “around big problems,” both domestically and abroad, he said.

Virginia Tech’s Honors College enrolls 1,670 students, representing 4.8 percent of the university’s undergraduate student population. More than 70 percent are Virginia residents.

Calhoun, a 1979 graduate, grew up in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania and majored in accounting at Virginia Tech, because, he said, “my father wanted me to study something that would get me a job,” he said.

At an event in Blacksburg last week to announce the gift, Calhoun expressed his fierce loyalty and gratitude to Virginia Tech for providing him with the “confidence” after graduation to succeed at one of the most brutally exacting companies in the Fortune 500.

“I knew the day I arrived (at GE, that) for whatever reason, the accounting degree I had made me a little better, a little more insightful, gave me a little more confidence than all the folks that were around me all competing for the same roles, the same jobs…. I always felt I was an inch ahead,” he said, according to a video on YouTube.

At the same time, he said that the professional ranks in corporate America too often lack broad-thinking individuals who can see across different fields to solve the critical problems in business, government and the nonprofit sector.

“What we don’t have are enough people who know how to go about that, who really know how and are practiced in bringing different disciplines together so we can conquer these things faster, more expeditiously, and frankly in a better way,” he said.

Calhoun spent 26 years at GE and shuttled through a series of senior executive posts, including running such business units as GE Lighting, GE Employers Reinsurance Co., GE Aircraft Engines and GE Transportation, before becoming vice chairman of the infrastructure group.

In 2006, he joined the data analytics company Nielsen as chief executive after it was acquired by a group of private equity investors, including Blackstone.

He went to Blackstone in 2014 as a senior managing director and head of private equity portfolio operations, where he works with CEOs of Blackstone-owned companies in recruiting members to their respective boards, he said.

Calhoun and his wife, Barbara, acquired a three-floor, 6,740-square-foot lakeside residence on Garnet Hill Road in Sunapee for $1.85 million in 2006, according to town assessing records.

The residence was previously owned by Dartmouth College President Jim Wright and his wife, Susan. Calhoun said he acquired the property after visiting Dartmouth — where his daughter was also a student — as a guest lecturer and had stopped in to visit Wright.

“Jim said he had a house in Sunapee that he was looking to sell,” Calhoun said.

“I grew up on a lake in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania as a kid,” he added, noting he’s always enjoyed “lake life.”

Calhoun said he sold his prior residence in New Canaan, Conn., last year and Sunapee is now his primary residence. His wife, Barbara, sits on the board of the Lake Sunapee Protective Association.

John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.

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