Gannett News Service, October 19, 2007

Gannett News Service, October 19, 2007

Star-Gazette.com

New gifts push Cornell above $1 billion mark in fund campaign

ITHACA — With a recent bonanza of $71.5 million in major gifts, including its largest ever donation to the arts and humanities, Cornell University is a quarter of the way to its $4 billion capital campaign, the university announced Thursday.

The gifts move the university past the $1 billion mark on the Ithaca main campus and put the overall total so far at $1.8 billion when funds for Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City are added.

“This year has been one of unprecedented partnership between the university and its alumni, parents and friends, as we worked together to advance the campaign,” said Cornell President David J. Skorton. “In particular, the new gifts in support of the humanities, social sciences, sustainability and the arts will energize our efforts in fundamental ways, enabling our faculty to offer new approaches to learning that inspire our students to discover and create. I am profoundly grateful to all who have contributed.”

The campaign was formally launched in October 2006, with a target date of the end of 2011, four years before the university’s 150th anniversary. It is Cornell’s largest fundraising campaign ever and is among the largest in American higher education. The money is to be used for a variety of purposes, but Skorton has emphasized the need to attract the best and most deserving students, attract talented faculty in part to replace a large number retiring in the next 10 years, and to better link Cornell’s disparate research and outreach fields.

Skorton is to give the state of the university address to trustees and the University Council today on the Ithaca campus.

The humanities gift is $15 million donated by a third-generation Cornell alumnus or alumna the university did not name. In addition, a couple anonymously donated $10 million, half of it to endow the chair of the English Department.

“English is by far the largest humanities department in the Arts College, and it is a lynchpin for the humanities,” said Peter Lepage, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “The Arts College does almost half the teaching of the university, even though it comprises only a third of the faculty. That’s why these gifts are great for the whole university. We provide the liberal arts component for every Cornell undergraduate program.”

The College of Arts and Sciences is also receiving $6.5 million from the estate of the late Beatrice Mayhew Moore Stump, a 1937 alumna, split evenly between the college’s unrestricted endowment and for scholarships for undergraduate students. It’s also the beneficiary of $4 million from alumnus Stanford Taylor to endow the chair of the Sage School of Philosophy within the arts and sciences college. And the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation issued a $2.5 million challenge grant to the arts and sciences college to create new faculty positions.

Three separate gifts will benefit the university’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art with major additions and purchases: $1 million from Bob and Helen Appel, $1 million from trustee Ira Drukier and his wife, Gale, and $1.5 million fro Susan Eckert Lynch, in memory of her late husband Ronald Lynch, a 1958 alumnus who was vice chairman of the Cornell trustees.

Beyond the humanities, the social sciences are benefiting from $5 million from trustee Donald Opatrny to name the chair of the economics department, while a $5 million gift from an anonymous donor will endow the chair of the government department. The Drukiers are giving $5 million to support named deanships in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, while Kenneth Kahn is doing the same in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Outside the humanities and social sciences, trustee David Croll is giving $5 million for a professorship and program funds within the College of Engineering, and University Council member David Atkinson $1 million in seed money to help launch the Center for a Sustainable Future.