A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Ruth Gottesman gave $1 billion to support free medical school tuition in perpetuity. The gift ensures that, beginning in August, students entering the medical school program will have all of their tuition covered for the duration of their time there, and current fourth-year students will be reimbursed for their spring 2024 semester tuition.
Gottesman is a professor emerita in the college’s Department of Pediatrics. She joined the college’s Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center in 1968 at a time when learning problems were often unrecognized and misdiagnosed. While there, she developed specialized screening, evaluation, and treatment tools, and in 1992, she started the center’s adult-literacy program. Gottesman was named the founding director of the Emily Fisher Landau Center for the Treatment of Learning Disabilities in 1998. She currently leads the medical school’s Board of Trustees.
Her late husband, David Gottesman, led the New York investment firm First Manhattan, and was an early Berkshire Hathaway investor and a protégé of Warren Buffett. He left Gottesman his valuable stock portfolio when he died in 2022 with instructions to do whatever she thought best with the fortune.
Philadelphia Orchestra
Leslie Miller and Richard Worley gave $25 million to rename the orchestra’s home theater for the late opera singer and civil-rights icon Marian Anderson, who was from Philadelphia. The theater formerly known as Verizon Hall, and which is housed in the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, will now be named Marian Anderson Hall.
Anderson was a renowned opera singer during the first half of the 20th century and an activist during the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. She performed with major opera companies and orchestras throughout Europe but battled segregation and racism in the U.S. in the early decades of her career. Her stateside breakthrough came in 1939 after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her perform at Constitution Hall, their headquarters in Washington.
One the group’s members, then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, resigned from the organization and then arranged for Anderson to perform on Easter Sunday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Anderson made history that day, singing before a desegregated audience of 75,000 people and the millions more who heard her over the radio. In 1955, Anderson became the first Black artist to perform a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera.
Worley founded Permit Capital LLC in 2002. He started his career in the 1970s working as an economist at Goldman Sachs, and went on to become president and CEO of Morgan Stanley Investment Management before starting his investment firm. He has served on the Philadelphia Orchestra Board of Trustees since 1997, serving as chairman from 2009 to 2019.
Miller is a lawyer who was a partner at the now shuttered Philadelphia law firm of McKissock & Hoffman, P.C. She served as general counsel of Pennsylvania under Gov. Ed Rendell from 2003 to 2005.
DePaul University School of Music
Mary Patricia Gannon left more than $10 million to expand programs and support students and faculty. University officials have named the concert hall in the Holtschneider Performance Center the Mary Patricia Gannon Concert Hall.
Gannon spent her career in Chicago politics. She was part of two Chicago mayoral administrations, serving as a communications director and assistant press secretary. She was also a longtime supporter of DePaul, the performing arts, and social causes throughout Chicago. Her involvement with the School of Music spanned several decades, including serving on the school’s advisory board from 2004 until her death last year.
University of California at Los Angeles
Howard and Irene Levine gave $10 million through their Howard and Irene Levine Family Foundation to establish the UCLA Howard and Irene Levine Family Center for Movement Disorders at the David Geffen School of Medicine and back research on Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases.
The gift will also pay for five new endowments in the medical school’s department of neurology including a permanent-appointment chair, three term-appointment chairs, and a movement disorders research fund.
Howard Levine founded ARCS Commercial Mortgage, a Calabasas Hills, Calif., mortgage-financing company that he led until it was acquired by PNC Financial Services Group in 2007. He earned an MBA in urban-land economics from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 1967.
San Diego State University
Brothers Ron and Lloyd Dong Jr. gave $5 million to support the university’s Black Resource Center, which at the Dongs’s direction will be named for Gus and Emma Thompson, a Black couple that helped the brothers’ Chinese-immigrant parents settle and prosper in the San Diego area more than 80 years ago.
Gus Thompson was born into slavery in the early years of the Civil War in Kentucky. He moved to the San Diego area in the late 1880s and built a home and a livery stable, above which were rooms he rented to Black coach drivers and other workers who had trouble finding housing.
The Dong brothers’ parents, Lloyd Sr., a gardener, and his wife, Margaret, rented a house from the Thompsons at a time when few in the area were willing to rent to Chinese immigrants. Gus Thompson not only rented a home to the Dongs, but after his death, Emma Thompson sold the property, including the apartment building, to the Dong family under her late husband’s rent-to-own agreement with the Dongs.
The brothers are now directing $5 million of the proceeds from the sale of the apartment building and the home to the university.
“When you look at all the things that Gus Thompson did, he did a lot of things for a lot of other people, things that they might otherwise could never have done themselves,” Ron Dong said in a news release. “We wanted to do something to repay him; to give back.”
Cleveland Orchestra
Jim and Myrna Spira gave $4.6 million to support the orchestra’s artistic programming, its pension fund, and the annual fund. The gift also endows the Myrna and Jim Spira Bass Clarinet Chair.
Jim Spira founded Spira + Company, a management-consulting firm in Cleveland and Los Angeles. He serves as the chairman of Point To Point, a Cleveland marketing strategy and communications firm; BluShift Strategy, a Cleveland business consultancy; and Herman-Scheer, a branding and marketing agency in Los Angeles. He has served on the orchestra’s Board of Trustees since 2014.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
