April 6, 2006 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Columbia University, in New York, and New York University have each received $200-million gifts for new research institutes. The donations rank among the 15 largest private gifts received by any college or university in the United States, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Dawn M. Greene and the Jerome L. Greene Foundation gave Columbia the largest donation in the university’s 252-year history, made in honor of Mrs. Greene’s late husband, Jerome L. Greene.
Mr. Greene, who died in 1999, was a Columbia alumnus and earned his wealth as a lawyer and real-estate investor. The gift will construct a center for neurobiology. University officials said the money will come from Mrs. Greene and the Greene Foundation but they declined to disclose specific terms of the gift.
The gift to New York University, from the Leon Levy Foundation, will be used to establish the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. The donation of cash and real estate was announced by Shelby White, the widow of Leon Levy, an investor in New York who died in 2003.
Columbia University’s proposed science center is part of an ambitious undertaking by the university to expand both its physical campus and its program in the neurosciences.
The university has appointed Thomas Jessell, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics, and Richard Axel and Eric Kandel, both Nobel Prize laureates for their studies on how the brain functions, to oversee the center, which “will attempt to bridge the sciences concerned with the natural world with the meaning of human experience,” according to Dr. Kandel.
On the agenda for the new center is finding treatments for serious brain and psychiatric disorders — including autism, dementia, schizophrenia, and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases — as well as diseases commonly associated with child development and aging.
The center will be built on Columbia’s proposed Manhattanville campus in West Harlem, north of the main campus in Morningside Heights.
Mr. Greene was a founding member of Marshall, Bratter, Greene, Allison & Tucker, a New York law firm. He received his undergraduate degree from Columbia in 1926, followed by a law degree in 1928. In his lifetime, Mr. Greene was a major supporter of arts, education, and health-care institutions in New York. Since his death, Mrs. Greene, who is chief executive officer of the Greene Foundation, has continued to direct her philanthropy toward similar causes.
With the gift from the Levy Foundation, NYU plans to establish an interdisciplinary center for ancient studies that will widen the scope of traditional approaches to classical education. Though primarily a graduate research facility with its own doctoral program, the institute will also hold public lectures and exhibitions and maintain a large library collection.
The center for ancient studies is partly the brainchild of Mr. Levy himself, who, before his death, had created an advisory board of scholars to discuss ways to bring the study of antiquity into the modern world. Mrs. White said that the institute reflects Mr. Levy’s “long-term approach” to both business and life, as well as his dedication to studying the past.
Mr. Levy, who had been vice chairman of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, was an avid collector of ancient art who supported many causes related to art history, art conservation, and archaeology in his lifetime.
Part of the Levy Foundation’s gift consists of a six-story townhouse that will contain the proposed center. The university expects to matriculate its first Ph.D. candidates at the institute in the fall of 2008.
