The University of North Texas lecture series that featured Donald Trump Jr. expects to net at least $183,000, money that school officials say will help support student scholarships.

Almost all of that — $180,000 — equals the amount pledged by two prominent Republican donors, including the school’s top regent, Brint Ryan.

New financial records obtained by The Dallas Morning News show that Ryan, through the tax advisory firm he runs, has pledged a total of $160,000 toward the lecture series, more than previously reported.

An additional $20,000 came from Doug Deason, a Dallas investor who has said he and his father raised millions for President Donald Trump’s campaign.

A university spokeswoman noted that donations to the lecture series can continue until the end of the academic year. Melissa Francis, a Fox news anchor, will speak as part of the lecture series this week.

When the university announced late last summer that Trump Jr. would be the featured speaker at the October lecture, some students, faculty and alumni voiced opposition to the choice, complaining that it was an endorsement of the president and his policies. The university's president, Neal Smatresk, told faculty in emails obtained by The News that he was trying to stop the speech but ended up participating in the event.

Ryan, who says he has advised President Trump on tax policy, played a key role in landing Trump Jr. as speaker for the university's annual event, the Kuehne Speaker Series. The series has drawn big names like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens. Donors can sponsor tables; proceeds go into an endowment that the school is using for scholarships.

After Ryan offered Trump Jr. a $100,000 speaking fee for the lecture plus $5,000 in travel expenses, school officials discussed how to defray the cost, the emails obtained by The News show. Ryan personally worked to lower the cost to rent AT&T Stadium, where the lunchtime lecture was held in October, to $125,000.

In a question-and-answer period immediately following Trump Jr.'s speech, Ryan said media coverage hadn't focused on the student scholarship money and told the crowd that the event would raise more than $100,000.

The university told The News this month that Ryan's company had pledged an additional $60,000 the day before the speech. He has yet to pay it.

Ryan declined to comment on his donations. In an email he said The News had caused tens of thousands of dollars of public resources to be wasted on a "non-story," referring to the records the university supplied to The News as state law requires.

Public institutions like UNT are allowed to demand payment to cover the cost of gathering and providing records; the university has not charged The News to fill its requests.

Those allowable costs “wouldn’t nearly cover the time that’s been wasted by our Senior Leadership, including me,” Ryan wrote in an email. “I really wish we could charge you the full costs for this boondoggle.”

Deason told The News in an email that although he had never donated to the lecture series before, he made his pledge this year because he is friends with Ryan and Trump Jr. Deason's family firm holds an interest in Ryan's company, according to that company's website. Deason also said he admires Ernie Kuehne, the UNT alumnus who founded the lecture series five years ago.

Donations to the lecture series are tax-deductible.

Deason, who said he sat next to Trump Jr. at the luncheon, said the president’s son gave “one of his very best” speeches and received a standing ovation before shaking hands and signing autographs for an hour.

Like Ryan, Deason criticized media coverage surrounding the event. In response to a reporter's fact-checking questions, Deason said The News and other "lamestream" media sources "made a huge deal about a conservative speaker coming to speak on a university campus."

Because the lecture was sponsored by a public university, state law dictated that the event had to be nonpolitical in nature.

Even though Trump Jr. didn't campaign for his father during his speech, politics surrounded his visit. That night, he addressed a private gathering of a pro-Trump political action committee at Pickens' ranch in the Texas Panhandle, The Associated Press reported. Deason flew out there the next morning, he told The News, and then came back to co-host a Republican fundraiser featuring the president in Dallas.