$1 Billion Donation Will Provide Free Tuition at a Bronx Medical School Ruth Gottesman, a longtime professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is making free tuition available to all students going forward.
$1 Billion Donation Will Provide Free Tuition at a Bronx Medical School
Ruth
Gottesman, a longtime professor at the Albert Einstein College of
Medicine, is making free tuition available to all students going
forward.
Ruth Gottesman is giving $1 billion to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.Credit...David Dee Delgado for The New York Times
The
93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier has donated $1 billion to a
Bronx medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with
instructions that the gift be used to cover tuition for all students
going forward.
The donor, Ruth
Gottesman, is a former professor at Einstein, where she studied learning
disabilities, developed a screening test and ran literacy programs. It
is one of the largest charitable donations to an educational institution in the United States and most likely the largest to a medical school.
The fortune came from her late husband,
David Gottesman, known as Sandy, who was a protégé of Warren Buffett
and had made an early investment in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate
Mr. Buffett built.
The donation is
notable not only for its staggering size, but also because it is going
to a medical institution in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough. The
Bronx has a high rate of premature deaths and ranks as the unhealthiest county
in New York. Over the past generation, a number of billionaires have
given hundreds of millions of dollars to better-known medical schools
and hospitals in Manhattan, the city’s wealthiest borough.
Dr.
Gottesman said her donation would enable new doctors to begin their
careers without medical school debt, which often exceeds $200,000. She
also hoped it would broaden the student body to include people who could
not otherwise afford to go to medical school.
While
her husband ran an investment firm, First Manhattan, Dr. Gottesman had a
long career at Einstein, a well-regarded medical school, starting in
1968, when she took a job as director of psychoeducational services. She
has long been on Einstein’s board of trustees and is currently the
chair.
In recent years, she has become
close friends with Dr. Philip Ozuah, the pediatrician who oversees the
medical college and its affiliated hospital, Montefiore Medical Center,
as the chief executive officer of the health system. That friendship and
trust loomed large as she contemplated what to do with the money her
husband had left her.
In an interview
on Friday at the Einstein campus in the Morris Park neighborhood, Dr.
Ozuah and Dr. Gottesman spoke about the donation, how it came together
and what it would mean for Einstein medical students.
The Friendship
Dr.
Gottesman became close friends with Dr. Philip Ozuah, who oversees the
medical college and its affiliated hospital, Montefiore Medical Center.
In
early 2020, the two sat next to each other on a 6 a.m. flight to West
Palm Beach, Fla. It was the first time they had spent hours together.
They
spoke about their childhoods — hers in Baltimore, his, some 30 years
later, in Nigeria — and what they had in common. Both had doctorates in
education and had spent their careers at the same institution in the
Bronx, helping children and families in need.
Dr.
Ozuah described moving to New York, not knowing a single person in the
state, and spending years as a community doctor in the South Bronx
before ascending to the top of the medical school.
Leaving
the airport, Dr. Ozuah offered his arm to Dr. Gottesman, then not quite
90, as they approached the curb. She waved him off and told him to
“watch your own step,” he recalled with a chuckle.
Within
a few weeks, the coronavirus brought the world to a grinding halt. Dr.
Gottesman’s husband, in his 90s, became ill with the new pathogen, and
she had a mild case. Dr. Ozuah sent an ambulance to the Gottesman home
in Rye, N.Y., to bring them to Montefiore, the Bronx’s largest hospital.
In
the weeks that followed, Dr. Ozuah began making daily house calls — in
full protective gear — to check in on the couple as Mr. Gottesman
recovered. “That’s how the friendship evolved,” he said. “I spent
probably every day for about three weeks, visiting them in Rye.”
About
three years ago, Dr. Ozuah asked Dr. Gottesman to head the medical
school’s board of trustees. She had done the job before, but given her
age, she was surprised. The gesture reminded her of the fable about the lion and the mouse,
she told Dr. Ozuah at the time, explaining that when the lion spares
the mouse’s life, the mouse tells him, “Maybe someday I’ll be helpful to
you.”
In the story, the lion laughs haughtily. “But Phil didn’t go ‘ha, ha, ha,’” she noted with a smile.
The Money
Dr.
Gottesman’s husband left her a large stock portfolio with instructions
to “do whatever you think is right with it,” she said.
Dr.
Gottesman’s husband died in 2022 at age 96. “He left me, unbeknownst to
me, a whole portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway stock,” she recalled. The
instructions were simple: “Do whatever you think is right with it,” she
recalled.
It was overwhelming to think about, so at first she didn’t. But her children encouraged her not to wait too long.
When
she focused on the bequest, she realized immediately what she wanted to
do, she recalled. “I wanted to fund students at Einstein so that they
would receive free tuition,” she said. There was enough money to do that
in perpetuity, she said.
Over the
years, she had interviewed dozens of prospective Einstein medical
students. Tuition is more than $59,000 a year, and many graduated with
crushing medical school debt. According to the school, nearly 50 percent
of its students owed more than $200,000 after graduating. At most other
New York City medical schools, less than 25 percent of new doctors owed
that much.
Not
only would future students be able to embark on their careers without
the debt burden, but she hoped that her donation would also enable a
wider pool of aspiring doctors to apply to medical school. “We have
terrific medical students, but this will open it up for many other
students whose economic status is such that they wouldn’t even think
about going to medical school,” she said.
“That’s
what makes me very happy about this gift,” she added. “I have the
opportunity not just to help Phil, but to help Montefiore and Einstein
in a transformative way — and I’m just so proud and so humbled — both —
that I could do it.”
Dr. Gottesman
went to see Dr. Ozuah in December to tell him that she would be making a
major gift. She reminded him of the lion and mouse story. This, she
explained, was the mouse’s moment.
“If someone said, ‘I’ll give you a transformative gift for the medical school,’ what would you do?” she asked.
There were probably three things, Dr. Ozuah said.
“One,” he began, “you could have education be free —”
“That’s what I want to do,” she said. He never mentioned the other ideas.
Dr. Gottesman sometimes wonders what her late husband would have thought of her decision.
“I
hope he’s smiling and not frowning,” she said with a chuckle. “But he
gave me the opportunity to do this, and I think he would be happy — I
hope so.”
Einstein will not be the first medical school to eliminate tuition.
Dr.
Gottesman was reluctant to attach her name to her donation. “Nobody
needs to know,” Dr. Ozuah recalled her saying at first. But Dr. Ozuah
insisted that others might find her life inspiring. “Here’s somebody who
is totally dedicated to the welfare of others and wants no accolades,
no recognition,” Dr. Ozuah said.
Dr.
Ozuah noted that the going price for getting your name on a medical
school or hospital was perhaps a fifth of Dr. Gottesman’s donation.
Cornell Medical College and New York Hospital now include the surname of
Sanford Weill, the former head of Citigroup. New York University’s
medical center was renamed for Ken Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot.
Both men donated hundreds of millions of dollars.
But
it is a condition of Dr. Gottesman’s gift that the Einstein College of
Medicine not change its name. Albert Einstein, the physicist who developed the theory of relativity, agreed to confer his name on the medical school, which opened in 1955.
The name, she noted, could not be beat. “We’ve got the gosh darn name — we’ve got Albert Einstein.”
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