Trustee emeritus and philanthropist Stephen Ashley ’62, MBA ’64, whose service and advocacy for Cornell spanned more than five decades and whose landmark gift created the Cornell CALS Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment in 2025, died July 29 in Richmond, New York. Ashley was 86. 

“Steve was truly a remarkable human being, and one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” President Michael I. Kotlikoff said. “He was fiercely dedicated to Cornell, largely because its mission resonated so profoundly with his own values. Solving problems through collaboration and consensus, bringing knowledge to bear on complex challenges, working together for everyone’s best interests – these were the approaches he took in all of his interactions, whether professionally or in his service to Cornell. He embodied the best of the Cornell ethos, and we will miss him deeply.” 

Ashley, who grew up in a small farming town in Ontario County, was proud of his family’s strong multigenerational relationship with Cornell and his upstate New York roots. He frequently spoke about meeting his wife, Janice Gilbert Ashley, at Cornell, about his fellow classmates and fraternity brothers, and about his delight that his daughter and two grandsons chose to attend Cornell. 

“Cornell gave me not only a professional life, but a personal life, too,” Ashley said in 2016 in a story in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences publication, periodiCALS. “There’s no way that I could give back to Cornell what Cornell has enabled me to do. Cornell was really the foundation for whatever successes I’ve had in life.” 

Ashley served for 55 years on the Cornell University Council and for 16 years on the Cornell Board of Trustees. He was also a member emeritus on the advisory councils for the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and co-chaired the university-wide Far Above campaign. He received the CALS Outstanding Alumni Award in 1998, and in 2016, was awarded the Frank H.T. Rhodes Exemplary Alumni Service Award, the university’s highest award for alumni service. 

The Ashleys endowed several funds at Cornell, including the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professorship at the Dyson School and the Ashley Family Professorship in Behavioral Economics in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. 

In recognition of the importance of teaching and advising, and in honor of his undergraduate adviser, whom he credited as greatly influencing his education and career, he endowed the Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Awards. He championed cross-college collaboration and was one of the early seed funders supporting interdisciplinary research teams within the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture.  

 “Steve believed deeply in Cornell’s ability to improve lives and address the world’s most pressing challenges,” said Benjamin Z. Houlton, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of CALS. “Through his extraordinary generosity, Steve has created opportunities that will empower generations of faculty, staff and students to lead with purpose and make a meaningful impact around the globe. His wisdom, encouragement and unwavering commitment to others shaped my own leadership journey in profound ways. His legacy will live on through the countless people he inspired and the enduring impact of the Ashley School.” 

Ashley said he was inspired to give the $55 million gift that created the Ashley School by Houlton’s vision, by subsequent conversations with CALS faculty and students on the applied, real-world nature of their work, and by President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes’ description of Cornell as “the land-grant institution to the world.” 

“That’s what has energized me in putting this together,” Ashley said earlier this year at a celebration to mark the launch of the Ashley School. “We really are the only place, in my mind, that can address these issues on a global basis. No one else can do this.” 

At the time of his death, Ashley was chairman and CEO of The Ashley Companies, a Rochester-based firm that specializes in property management, brokerage, financing and real estate investment. He was predeceased by his wife, Janice, and survived by their three children, five grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. 

Starr Todd and Jennifer Wholey are writers for Alumni Affairs and Development.