Private High School Receives $35-Million From Cable TV Executive; Other Gifts

A private school and a university have received big gifts.

* H.F. (Gerry) Lenfest, a cable-television executive, and his wife, Marguerite, have given $35-million to endow Mercersburg Academy, in Pennsylvania.

The couple’s gift, which is unrestricted, is the fourth-largest ever to a private U.S. high school, according to the National Association of Independent Schools. Mercersburg enrolls 422 students in grades 9 through 12. Its endowment had stood at $85-million before the gift.

Mr. Lenfest graduated from the academy in 1949. He owned the company that provided cable television to metropolitan Philadelphia; in January, Comcast Corporation bought Lenfest Communications, then the country’s ninth-largest cable provider.

* Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, and his wife, Pam, have pledged $10-million over the next five years to Tufts University, in Medford, Mass., to a program designed to encourage undergraduate students to take up public service. The Omidyars are both Tufts alumni.

Other recent gifts:

Anderson U. (Ind.): $1,000,000 from Jerry Stevenson of Estes Park, Colo., a physician, and his wife, Patricia, to endow a professorship in biology.

Brown U. (R.I.): $5,000,000 from Stephen Robert of Providence, R.I., chancellor of the university, for a president’s discretionary fund.

Duke U. (N.C.): $1,000,000 from Robert E. Torray of Bethesda, Md., an investment manager, and his wife, Nancy, for scholarships.

Iona College (N.Y.): $6,000,000 from Robert V. LaPenta of New York, president of L-3 Communications, to build a new student union.

Louisiana State U.: $1,500,000 from Gordon A. Cain of Houston, a chemical engineer, and his wife, Mary, for graduate fellowships at the College of Education.

Oklahoma Christian U.: $1,000,000 from David North of Reston, Va., vice president of the Netplex Group, and his wife, Beverly, to establish the Institute for Educational Technology.

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (Ind.): $1,500,000 from John White of Terre Haute, Ind., president of Hydro-Power Inc., and his wife, Elizabeth, to construct a chapel.

San Francisco Zoological Society: $2,000,000 from George Roberts of Atherton, Calif., an investment banker, and his wife, Leanne, to build an African savanna exhibit. The couple will also match all donations of $100,000 or less, up to a total of an additional $2,000,000.

Simmons College (Mass.): $1,100,000 from David S. Pottruck of San Francisco, president of Charles Schwab Corporation, and his wife, Emily Scott Pottruck, for a technology center and for community-service programs.

U. of Colorado at Boulder: $2,250,000 from Jim Roser of Boulder, Colo., a venture capitalist, and his wife, Becky, to construct a facility for the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society.

U. of Florida: $3,000,000 from Bill Emerson of St. Petersburg, Fla., retired senior vice president and national-sales director at Merrill Lynch, and his wife, Jane, for capital needs.

U. of Idaho: $1,300,000 bequest from the estate of Weldon Schimke of Moscow, Idaho, a lawyer, to endow three professorships at the College of Law.

Yale U. (Conn.): $5,000,000 from Joseph C. Fox of New York and Norfolk, Conn., a former director at the investment company Kidder Peabody, for a fellows-exchange program at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies.

Yeshiva U. (N.Y.): $1,500,000 from Gerald Dorros of Phoenix, a cardiologist, and his wife, Myra, a newspaper columnist who writes about food, to establish a professorship in cardiovascular disease at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.