Aiding the Schools That Gave Them a Chance

By Gretchen Morgensen

NOTHING succeeds like success, as the saying goes, and nowhere is that more evident than at the nation’s richest universities and colleges. Even as the coffers at Harvard, Yale and other prestigious institutions overflow, money continues to pour in, especially from their driven Type-A alumni.

Last March, for example, Columbia University announced a $200 million gift — its largest single donation — from Dawn M. Greene and the Jerome L. Greene Foundation. The money will establish a neuroscience center in honor of Mr. Greene, a former lawyer and real estate investor in New York who died in 1999. In August, Philip H. Knight, the founder of Nike, promised $105 million for a new business school campus at Stanford, a university with an endowment of $15 billion.

And Princeton University’s alumni have pledged more than $40 million to the school’s annual giving campaign this year, a record there. At last count, Princeton’s endowment stood at $12.7 billion.

With so much money going to A-list institutions, how are lesser-known universities competing? Some of them have stayed in the game by tapping into self-made alumni who remember the schools that gave them their chance.

Consider Syracuse University’s association with Martin J. Whitman, a 1949 graduate who is an unusually successful investor and mutual fund manager in New York. Mr. Whitman, 82, oversees Third Avenue Funds, a family of mutual funds that has beaten the market averages handily over the years.

Syracuse University, Mr. Whitman said, was the only school that would accept him as an undergraduate. Although he also attended Princeton at the graduate level, Mr. Whitman has focused much of his giving on Syracuse, providing the money for the Martin J. Whitman School of Management as well as scholarships for minority students who are not athletes.

Mr. Whitman declined to say how much he has given to his alma mater over the years, but he explained why he chose Syracuse. “During the G.I. bulge, it wasn’t easy to get in places,” Mr. Whitman recalled. “It was the only place that would take me.” The son of a women’s milliner, he grew up in the Bronx, one of three children in a lower-middle-class family, he said.

His decision to pay for a business school arose out of Mr. Whitman’s belief that most universities’ finance programs have little to do with the real world. “They don’t have a clue about 90 percent of what goes on in the financial community,” he said.

Tom Walsh, senior vice president for institutional advancement at Syracuse University, said that university officials understood that Mr. Whitman was a teacher at heart and appealed to him that way. “We began by putting him in the classroom,” Mr. Walsh said. “Not too long after that, Marty did a skillful analysis of what needed to happen to increase the quality of the a school.” The result, Mr. Walsh said, was a jump in Syracuse’s ranking among the nation’s universities.

Baruch College, one of the 11 senior colleges of the City University of New York, has also had success attracting money from grateful alumni, a process that was begun in earnest during the late 1990s after state financing for the institution began to decline. Bernard M. Baruch, the Depression-era financier and presidential adviser, endowed Baruch College with $9 million in 1953. But by 1998, the college’s endowment had barely budged.

Now, however, the endowment stands at $100 million, thanks to a throng of alumni who appreciate the education they received at Baruch. Their appreciation rises, some have told college officials, as they write tuition checks for their children to attend Ivy League colleges.

“Most of the donors are not shy about saying that they may have gone on to law degrees at Harvard and other degrees at Columbia, but they give back to Baruch because without Baruch they would not have gone on at all,” said Kathleen M. Waldron, Baruch’s president. “These are primarily men and some women who came from the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, who took the subway to college who could only go to Baruch because it was free.”

One major donor is Lawrence Zicklin, a former chairman of Neuberger Berman, the money management firm that is a subsidiary of Lehman Brothers. A Baruch graduate who wanted to give back to the institution that gave him his start, Mr. Zicklin donated $18 million in 1998 to build the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch. His and other alumni donations go to supplement professors’ salaries so that the institution can compete with richer universities.

“I had put aside money all the years I was working because I knew I wanted to make a gift to an educational institution,” Mr. Zicklin said. “I was indebted to City University. No Baruch, no Zicklin, I always say. Everything became possible because of Baruch.”

Like many Baruch students, Mr. Zicklin, 70, came from a family of modest means. He grew up in Brooklyn, where his father, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, owned a candy store. He went to public schools, then Baruch and on to receive his master’s in business administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

But he never forgot his undergraduate experience. “You learn how to be hungry at Baruch,” he said. “You learn how to scratch.”

The University of Massachusetts has also benefited from the achievements of its striving alumni. Like Baruch, it has coped with decreasing state financing, which recently accounted for just 26 percent of the university’s operating budget.

Eugene M. Isenberg, chief executive of Nabors Industries, an oil services business, has given approximately $9 million to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the school that he said helped him overcome a hardscrabble youth.

Mr. Isenberg, 76, the son of an immigrant father, grew up in Chelsea, Mass., a town that filed for bankruptcy after the Depression. His family was lower-middle class, but his father dissuaded him from joining the Navy right after high school and pushed him toward college instead. At the last minute, Mr. Isenberg applied to UMass to learn a trade, he said.

Although Mr. Isenberg went on to earn a master’s degree in economics from Princeton, he decided against donating money there. “I thought, Where could a buck go the farthest, where can you get the best productivity out of a contribution?” he said. “Princeton didn’t need it. I concluded UMass Amherst was the place.”

He and his wife, Ronnie have established the Isenberg School of Management at UMass and endowed three professorships there — one in integrative studies at the business school, another in environmental science and a third in engineering. The couple continue to provide the university with $70,000 in scholarship money every year.

“There are people out there who remember their roots and recognize the value of education in their own careers,” Mr. Isenberg said. “Education is key to the kingdom in America. I would like to give other people the opportunity I’ve had.”