The University of Virginia in Charlottesville has announced a $1 million gift from UVA alumnus, professor of politics, and nationally known political pundit Larry J. Sabato.

The gift, the largest ever given to the university by a member of its faculty, will support youth and adult civic participation activities through the school's Center for Politics, which Sabato founded and directs. According to the gift agreement, the university will restore a historic building on campus and make it the center's permanent home. The Youth Leadership Initiative, UVA's civic education program, serves more than one million students and over 14,000 primary and secondary school teachers nationwide and in U.S. territories and Department of Defense schools abroad.

"From his time as an undergraduate activist in the college of the 1970s to his years as a distinguished university professor, Larry Sabato has enriched the university," said UVA president John T. Casteen III. "In his teaching, research, and public service, Larry has built the university's intellectual capital. With his financial gift, a great personal sacrifice, he has demonstrated an abiding devotion to the university."

Sabato, 52, received a B.A. in government from UVA, studied public policy at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and, as a Rhodes Scholar, obtained a doctorate in politics at Queen's College, Oxford University. The author of twenty-three books, including The Rise of Political Consultants, Feeding Frenzy, and the forthcoming Armageddon: The Bush-Kerry Contest, Sabato once vowed to his mentor, the late Edgar F. Shannon Jr., UVA president from 1959 to 1974, that one day he would give the university a million dollars.

"If other alumni, teachers, and my 14,000 former students see I could do it, maybe they will, too," Sabato told the Washington Post. "This money is going to fulfill Thomas Jefferson's hope that this university would serve as a source of enlightenment for the citizenry."