Another Soros Plans to Give It All Away

When Paul Soros came to the United States from Hungary in 1948, he had $1,500 and little else.

Though he had been accepted into engineering programs at Columbia and Harvard Universities, among others, he couldn’t figure out how to pay tuition and still have enough left over to get by. So he ended up at the Polytechnic University, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the cheapest of all his options.

But the lack of an Ivy League degree didn’t hurt his future: He founded an engineering company that eventually had operations in 90 countries, and he received three patents for his inventions of new technology to load and unload coal and other commodities onto ships. Those activities, along with his investments — which he often makes along with his younger brother, the billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros — have helped him build a fortune estimated to be worth at least $500-million.

But Mr. Soros, 72, has not forgotten the difficulties of his first years in America. So he and his wife, Daisy, 68, who also emigrated from Hungary, have set up a $50-million fellowship program to help young immigrants and children of naturalized citizens pay for graduate school. They last month announced the names of the first round of fellowship winners.

“As immigrants, we had the proverbial seven lean years — where unless you have a lot of money or a lot of connections, it takes a while to learn the ropes or get to know how to function in American society,” says Mr. Soros, in the living room of the couple’s apartment overlooking Central Park. “Afterwards we did all right. But at the time, we both had great difficulties supporting ourselves.”

The name Soros has become synonymous with big-time philanthropy in the past two decades, as George Soros has dedicated over $1.5-billion to charitable causes worldwide. Though it is George’s philanthropy that has captured worldwide attention, Paul and Daisy Soros have nevertheless made a name for themselves in charity circles. Mr. and Mrs. Soros estimate that they give $4-million to $5-million a year to charity through a foundation that bears their names, and they have a reputation as volunteers who are always willing to provide their time and expertise. What’s more, they plan to leave a significant philanthropic legacy: They say that after their deaths they will turn over most of their fortune to two foundations, one for each of their sons to run.

In setting up their new fellowship program, the Soroses put $50-million into a charitable trust so that the program could operate in perpetuity.

But the couple has done more than simply donate the money. They spent much time talking with directors of other philanthropic programs that provide money to individuals, such as the MacArthur Fellows and the Rhodes Scholars. They also insisted that their program be run by a person with long-time experience in philanthropy, so they selected Warren F. Ilchman, who last year retired as head of Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy. And they recruited as advisers such prominent American immigrants as the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The 20 fellows selected in the first round of the fellowship program, all in their 20s, were chosen from more than 600 applicants. Among the 9 men and 11 women who received awards: a virtuoso pianist who escaped from the K.G.B. during a concert tour in America and defected; the son of Indian immigrants who invented a special prosthesis for amputees while still in medical school; and a Haitian woman who founded a microcredit project for poor mothers in the Dominican Republic.

All fellows will receive payment for half their tuition for up to three years, and an additional $20,000 annually for up to three years that they can use to pay the rest of their tuition or other expenses.

The creation of the scholarship program has allowed Daisy and Paul Soros to take a sentimental journey back to the days when they first met in a cafeteria line at International House, a New York center for foreign-born graduate students. The center was so important to them that they have long given it financial support, and Mrs. Soros has been a trustee of the organization since 1981. International House officials say they hope to work out an arrangement that will allow some recipients of the Soros fellowships to live at the graduate center and have the same experience that the Soroses did.

Before the couple met at International House, they had been students in Europe. After graduating from a hotel-management school in Switzerland, Mrs. Soros wanted to move to the United States, so she obtained a student visa in 1950 and attended Columbia University.

For Mr. Soros, the journey was much harder. The son of a Jewish lawyer, Paul Soros was a teen-ager when the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944. He survived largely because his father had obtained false identity papers for the family.

After the Communists came to power, Mr. Soros began to look for a way to escape from his home country. His chance came after he was selected to represent Hungary on its 1948 Olympic ski team. He defected when he was at the Games, held in Switzerland. From there he made his way to the United States to study engineering.

In the years after Paul emigrated, he rarely saw his brother, George, who fled Hungary in 1947 to live in London, but they remained close. Today they often see each other — and Paul serves on the advisory board of Quantum Industrial Holdings, one of George’s private equity investment funds.

While the two men have similarities in their philanthropy — both like to take a hands-on role — they also have differences.

Paul says he deliberately did not join George in making some of his gifts, and he says he was wary of George’s work to spur democracy and economic development in former Communist countries.

“Originally, I was skeptical whether he would be able to bring about the changes he was trying to bring about in these Communist countries,” Paul Soros says. “It turned out that he was successful beyond my expectations. I think he’s doing a great job because he is not following the conventional path — but doing what he thinks is right.”

The differences in style between the two men can be seen in the way each approached donations of $50-million to aid immigrants.

George Soros attracted much attention two years ago when he also set up a special $50-million fund for immigrants. He used the televised announcement of his donation to denounce Congress, which had just passed legislation that penalized legal immigrants by taking away benefits like food stamps. He directed that his money be given to organizations that help legal immigrants obtain citizenship and to advocacy groups that would lobby to protect immigrants from such punitive measures.

Paul Soros, on the other hand, says that he did not want to use the gift to “enter into the politics of immigration.”

He explains: “We are creating this program because we think there is a need — and that the contributions of new Americans to this country can be enhanced.

“Einstein, Szilard, Von Neumann, Bartok, Stravinsky — these individuals have all improved the lives of Americans. If people remember such contributions when we appoint new fellows, that is as much as we want to say about the issue of immigration.”

Even though he says he wants to stay out of the national debate over immigration, Paul Soros concedes that he hopes the fellows program will help overcome what he sees as a resurgence in anti-immigrant sentiment. “In recent years, there has been a lot of meanness displayed by certain elements in our society,” he says, choosing his words carefully, so he won’t anger anyone. “Of course, I don’t think that’s anything new. You go back to the Know-Nothing era, and then it was against the Irish.”

In spite of their differences in approach, the Soros brothers rely on each other’s judgment in their work and in their philanthropy and often bounce ideas off each other. Paul Soros says the brothers are very similar “in a sense where we like to do things where the money is getting — like in a business — real value for what you are trying to do.”

As an example, Paul points to his efforts to design a new program at his alma mater, the Polytechnic University, that is intended to turn engineering students into leaders in the increasingly competitive engineering and construction industry. Just a year old, the program, called Exec 21, teaches management and business principles not traditionally taught in engineering programs, such as global markets and construction law. In all, Mr. Soros has given more than $2-million to the university.

Mr. Soros has also lent his international engineering and business experience and his donations to another non-profit organization: TechnoServe, an international-development group that works in Latin America and Africa.

As a member of the executive committee of the charity’s board, Mr. Soros has helped guide policy and strategy at TechnoServe for the past six years. The group helps the rural poor in developing countries start their own businesses and expand their agricultural activities.

Mr. Soros, who has accompanied TechnoServe officials to El Salvador and is planning to go with them to Mozambique later this year to oversee charity operations there, has pushed the charity to look more keenly at its cost-effectiveness. TechnoServe leaders say he is constantly peppering them with questions like: If you enter a country, does it make sense? It’s great that you’re doing good work, but how much did it cost? Are we providing a good return on investment for our donor dollars?

While Mr. Soros’s internation al engineering background influences his pet causes, Mrs. Soros’s training in social work at New York University has influenced her charitable activities.

As a board member of Cornell University’s medical school, Mrs. Soros developed a series of breakfasts for current and prospective donors that she named “Information Please!” The college holds roughly 10 breakfasts per year, each on a given topic in the field of structural biology, neuroscience, or genetic medicine.

“There are some philanthropists that only want to give money,” says Sue B. Dorn, the medical school’s vice-provost for development. “She very much wants to be informed and involved. She has a great curiosity and likes learning about these things.”

Mrs. Soros has also spent much of her free time counseling terminally ill patients. Based on her volunteering experience she is starting a new program at Cornell’s medical school that will teach students how to deal with dying patients. Mrs. Soros says she is starting the program because “there is no textbook and no facilitator at the moment for teaching young doctors how to deal with dying patients.”

The Soroses say they have devoted much attention to what will happen to their fortune after they die. They have talked about that with their sons, who will each be in charge of a family philanthropy. Their son Peter, 42, is an investment banker in London, while Jeffrey, 37, is a screen writer in Los Angeles.

“It’s more peaceful that way, I think,” says Mrs. Soros, laughing as she describes the decision to set up separate foundations.

Adds a grinning Mr. Soros, “But in a way, I’m passing the buck. It will be their problem what they do, and how.”

More seriously, he says, “I don’t want to pull the strings from the grave for what they do.”