$200-Million Donated to Calif. College; MIT and a Pa. Fund Also Win Big Gifts

Three institutions have received $100-million or more from individuals:

• Robert Day, a California financier, is giving $200-million to his alma mater, Claremont McKenna College, a liberal-arts institution in Claremont, Calif., to pay for a new master’s-degree program for economics and finance. Mr. Day helped the college design the program. In addition, the college plans to upgrade undergraduate programs in those fields and finance new scholarships.
• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has received a $100-million pledge from David H. Koch, an executive vice president of Koch Industries and an alumnus of the university, to build a new cancer-research center.
• The Erie Community Foundation, in Pennsylvania, has received an anonymous pledge of $100-million. The donor asked that $85-million go to make unrestricted gifts to local charities and $15-million be given to groups nationwide.

Mr. Day’s gift to Claremont McKenna will be used to create an alternative to the traditional master of business administration program, said the college’s president, Pamela Gann. She said that fewer young adults want to return to college for their master’s degree after entering the work force, in part because their salaries are increasing at a rapid pace and also because many of them don’t want to disrupt their finances or their personal lives.

She says the college hopes to deal with that trend by giving liberal-arts undergraduates a broader understanding of finance and organizational psychology, and offering them the opportunity to get M.B.A.-level training in a master’s-degree program.

Mr. Day said he thinks a liberal-arts education is crucial to the making of a competent leader. “It broadens your perspective,” he says. But those same leaders, he says, also need a certain level of competency in finance, accounting literacy, and leadership psychology, and he has worked closely with the college to design a program that will include those subjects.

“This is not to turn the college into a trade school; it’s to emphasize leadership,” Mr. Day says, adding that today’s students get a strong enough education that they don’t necessarily need an M.B.A. to succeed.

Mr. Day graduated from the college in 1965 and has served on its Board of Trustees since 1970.

Cancer Research

Mr. Koch’s gift to MIT is a response in part to his personal battle with prostate cancer. Mr. Koch, who is in remission from the disease, provided the money for a center that will employ a mix of molecular geneticists, cell biologists, and engineers that the university says is rare in cancer research.

Ranked No. 9 on Forbes magazine’s 2007 list of the 400 richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of $17-billion, Mr. Koch, 67, is also a member of the board at Koch Industries, an investment and manufacturing company based in Wichita, Kan., that was founded by his father, Fred C. Koch.

The donor received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering at the Cambridge, Mass., institution, and has served on its Board of Trustees since 1988.

Community Fund

In Erie, Pa., the anonymous donor — who lives in the city — did not put any strings on his gift, but he did express a strong preference that the local charities use their money to create endowments at the Erie Community Foundation, says Mike Batchelor, who has been president of the foundation for 17 years. He says he suspects that $60-million of the $85-million will be used this way.

The local organizations that will benefit are mostly small human-service groups, including housing and health-service providers, food banks, women’s shelters, religious organizations, and children’s groups, says Mr. Batchelor.

The Second Harvest Food Bank, Vision and Blindness Resources, St. Paul’s Neighborhood Free Clinic, and the Mercy Center for Women, all located in Erie, will receive some of the gift, and the donor also earmarked gifts for Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Gannon University, and Mercyhurst College.

Mr. Batchelor estimates the grants will be between $1-million and $2-million apiece and will be distributed over a three-year period that will probably start in 2009.

“Frankly, I think that’s kind of brilliant, because it gives the agencies time to plan,” Mr. Batchelor says of the three-year arrangement. “For most of them, it’s the largest gift they’ve ever received.”

The Erie Community Foundation and the United Way of Erie County will each receive $11-million.

The community foundation’s gift is unrestricted, and Mr. Batchelor says the money will enable the fund to award $1.1-million each year in grants to local groups. The donor directed the United Way’s gift to its endowment.

He says he will not name the charities that are not in Erie because doing so “might give away the donor,” though he said they include universities and religious groups.