A University President Sprang a Student From Internment Camp; His Heirs Give Back (Gifts Roundup)

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

University of Louisville

Three donors left bequests totaling nearly $9 million. Robert Ling, a retired New York advertising executive who died last year at 77, left nearly $4.7 million to establish the J.T. Ling, MD, Endowed Chair in Radiology. Ling was the son of the late J.T. Ling, a former chair and faculty member in the Department of Radiology at the university’s School of Medicine.

Emily Spradlin bequeathed approximately $2.7 million, of which half will be used to create the Dr. Marion Carroll Spradlin Endowed Scholarship Fund for the School of Medicine, and the remainder will be used at the direction of the Dean of Libraries. Spradlin, a retired librarian, died in 2018 at 96. The scholarship fund is named for her late brother.

Heddy Kurz left roughly $1.7 million for new construction, the purchase of equipment at the School of Medicine and at the J.B. Speed School of Engineering, and to support other programs. Kurz attended the university in the late 1930s and served in later years on the institution’s Board of Overseers. She died in 2017 at 100.

CARE and International Rescue Committee

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her fiance, Tom Bernthal, gave $5 million through the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation to help women and girls during the pandemic, especially those stuck in refugee camps around the world.

The money will go toward efforts to protect women and girls from domestic violence as many are quarantines at home with their abusers. It will also be used to maintain women’s access to quality and safe health care, including sexual and reproductive health, and it will back women leaders.

Sandberg is a billionaire and serial philanthropist who has primarily supported nonprofits that help women, gender-equality groups, food banks, education, and charities that fight poverty. She has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors four times since 2016. Bernthal founded Kelton Global, a marketing consultancy.

Anti-Defamation League

Billionaire Craig Newmark gave $1 million through his Craig Newmark Philanthropies to back the group’s work to detect, expose, and counter online hate speech through the ADL’s Center on Technology and Society, including the Online Hate Index. The money will also be used to bolster the organization’s overall activities during the Covid-19 crisis.

Newmark founded the online advertising site Craigslist and has given extensively to nonprofits in recent years. He has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors for the last two years.

Arizona Coronavirus Relief Fund

Jerry Simms donated $1 million to help the fund in its efforts to pay for personal protective equipment for frontline medical personnel and organizations caring for Arizona’s vulnerable populations, including food banks, homeless shelters, and domestic-violence groups. The fund is also supporting technology-access programs for low-income students practicing distance learning. Simms owns Turf Paradise Race Course, a thoroughbred and quarter-horse racetrack in Phoenix.

Willamette University Atkinson Graduate School of Management

The Watanabe family gave $1 million to support the Watanabe Scholars in Graduate Business Education. The gift from the Watanabe siblings — Brett, Guy, and Leslie Watanabe, and their sister, Laani Gazeley — will back the scholarship program established by their late parents, Taul and Schiko Watanabe, in the 1990s.

Taul Watanabe put himself through Willamette partly as a cannery worker in the late 1930s. He entered Willamette’s law school in 1941 just before the United States entered World War II that year. He was soon after sent to Puyallup Assembly Center, an internment camp in Washington state where many Japanese Americans in the Pacific Northwest were held during the war.

Willamette’s then president, G. Herbert Smith, helped to free him from Puyallup, and Taul went on to earn his law degree from the university in 1943. He became a real-estate developer in Los Angeles and Orange County, Calif., and negotiated the first container-ship agreement between the United States and Japan, and his family became life-long donors to Willamette.

He moved his family to Bellevue, Wash., in the late 1960s and served as vice president of Burlington Northern railway and chairman of the state Economic Council there. He helped the state establish business relations with China. He died in 1995, and Sachiko died last year.

Massachusetts General Hospital

S. Donald Sussman pledged $1 million to match donations from other donors who give to the hospital’s Emergency Response Fund.

Donations to the fund pay for personal protective equipment, a Covid-19 hotline with interpreters to reach a wide audience with up-to-date information, a telemedicine effort to provide health care while preventing possible exposure to the virus, and to subsidize child care costs for essential hospital employees.

Sussman founded Paloma Partners Management Company, a hedge fund in Greenwich, Conn.

To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.