Charlie Hoff

Class of '66

He doesn’t know the exact number, and he doesn’t want to name any names. But there have been a lot—at least 800, he guesses, maybe as many as 1,000—and some of them came with some pretty remarkable tales.

There was the former drug dealer and addict who had done jail time. He applied to be a Hoff scholar—at 38 years old—was approved, graduated UMass with a 3.8 GPA, then got a job with a Big Eight accounting firm.

Another one, also in his thirties, had been in jail. He came out of jail, applied and was approved for a Hoff scholarship, and went on to excel at UMass.

“These are people who turned their lives around,” says Charlie Hoff today. “We’ve had all kinds, all ages—we’ve had grandmothers—every kind of story you’d want to hear.”

Charlie Hoff (B.S., Lowell Tech 1966), at least officially, has been retired for the past five years. But you wouldn’t want to take that too literally. (Retirement, as Hoff likes to say, “is mostly a state of mind.”)

After nearly 20 years in management with some of the largest firms in the northeast—including Wang, Polaroid and Gillette—and another decade-plus as a major player in the venture-capital world, Hoff today is in the business (among others) of giving away UMass educations—150 a year, more or less.

And not only on the Lowell campus: there are dozens of Hoff scholars, each attending school tuition-free, at each of the five UMass campuses at any point in time.

Their majors run the gamut from management to nursing; their ages range from 19 to 60; and ethnically, they are as diverse as the world. All that joins them is their desire for an education, their financial need, their academic merit (as reflected in their GPAs, which must be at least 3.0 at the close of their freshman year), and the more subjective requirement that they be — as Charlie Hoff expresses it — "the sort of people who’ll make a difference in their communities…the sort of people who, if I were still hiring, I’d want to hire.”

There was a time, not long ago, when he did hire some of them. That was back in his venture-capital days—the early ’90s—when he bought into two companies, an optical-equipment outfit and a maker of circuitboards, and turned them both around. Probably more times than he can count, he footed the bill for a student’s UMass education, then became that student’s first employer in a job that often grew to a career.

“I believe strongly in the value of an education,” says Charlie Hoff today. “It’s what makes the difference. It’s the key to what determines a person’s mobility, and ultimately that person’s quality of life.”

It all began, as such things often do, with a problem that needed solving.

In the mid-’80s, as a senior vice president at Bausch & Lomb, Hoff was put in charge of Applied Research Laboratories (ARL), a company division that was hemorrhaging money—$12 million in losses on $100 million in sales. A year later, under his direction, the division showed a profit. A year after that, he bought it—with a partner, in a $32 million leveraged buyout—and two years later sold it, for more than twice what he’d paid. With the profits, he founded another company —Universal/Univis, in North Attleboro—which, five years later, was, with $20 million in annual sales, the largest manufacturer of design eyewear in the United States.

It was at that point that the giving began in earnest. Although he has served as a UMass trustee for 10 years, and was a major donor well before that—he set up the family-run Hoff Foundation as early as 1986 as a source for scholarships—six years ago Charlie Hoff made a $1 million pledge to the University. Since then, what has become known as the Hoff Scholars Program has awarded scholarship funds totaling more than $1.6 million to students at all five campuses.

(Northeastern University, at which he earned a master’s in engineering management, has likewise been a recipient of his generosity. Three years ago, he made a $1 million pledge there as well.)

Right from the start, the giving has been a family affair. Every year, as nearly as he can guess, somewhere around 350 students apply for Hoff Scholarships. Of these, roughly 225 will be interviewed—if not by Charlie Hoff himself, then by his brother, his mother, one of two daughters, sometimes other family members as well. The University will then make the final decisions. In a typical year, says Hoff, roughly 40 percent of the original 350 will be approved for scholarships by the University.

“There are all kinds of folks we’re helping who, for one reason or another, just aren’t able to do this for themselves. My family and I—we’ve been able to make a difference in a lot of lives…It’s a great feeling to know that. Sometimes I think I get more out of all this than some of the students do.”