Published on Show Me Mizzou Dec. 17, 2025
When Rich and Nancy Kinder gave their founding $25 million gift to launch the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy in 2015, they truly believed in what they were doing. Still, they didn’t know just how relevant their work would be 10 years later.
“I thought it would be important,” says Rich Kinder, BA ’66, JD ’68, “but I didn’t realize we were heading into a time where we would have such divisive politics at the state and federal level — where we’d have camps that just think whatever the other side says is a lie, and there’s no civil discourse anymore. Over the 10 years since we founded it, I think it’s become much more important than I ever dreamed it would become.”
That importance comes from Kinder’s core mission. Whether students are learning the origins of American democracy on campus, exploring the inner workings of government and policy in the Washington, D.C. program or expanding their understanding of constitutional history at Oxford or in South Africa, the goal is not to sway them to any particular idea or ideology, but rather to ground them in context and critical thinking.
That sort of grounding has served Kinder in his own highly successful business career. He’s more likely to turn to Winston Churchill than to a business text when it comes to negotiation tactics, for instance. Given his own varied career in law and business, he takes pride in the Kinder Institute’s service to students in a wide range of disciplines.
“We don’t just want to educate lawyers,” he says. “We need doctors, engineers, journalists and architects to understand the founding. They’ll all go out there and be leaders in their community in a different discipline.”
The couple’s belief in the institute’s mission is evident in follow-up gifts through the years, bringing their total funding to $60 million. That investment has helped Kinder evolve and expand every single program it offers, all benefiting some of the top-performing students at the University of Missouri.
“I think that the Kinder Institute will help these students form an understanding of what this country’s all about,” Kinder says. “And I think they’ll carry that with them. That’s a positive for the state of Missouri, but in a broader sense for wherever these graduates go.”
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