Stony Brook University receives $500 million, an unusually large gift

Stony Brook University, a Long Island public school, received a $500 million donation Thursday from a foundation set up by an alumnus and former faculty member, making it the recipient of one of the greatest gifts to a university in American history.

The donation, which will go to the school’s endowment, will also lead to another $200 million injection of public funds under a donation-matching program passed in April as part of New York’s state budget. York. The school said it hopes the gift will encourage other donations that could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Gifts of that magnitude are rare for universities, and especially for public institutions like Stony Brook, one of the flagship schools of the State University of New York. The donation, plus matching funds from the state, is nearly twice the amount of Stony Brook’s current $370 million endowment, the university’s president, Maurie McInnis, said in an interview.

The donation was made by the Simons Foundation, which was founded in 1994 by Jim Simons, a former Stony Brook math professor who went on to make billions as a hedge fund manager, and his wife Marilyn Simons, who received her undergraduate and doctorate degrees from Stony Brook.

The university has long been known as one engine of social mobility, by enrolling students from the poor and working class and propelling many of them into the middle and upper classes of American life. But that role has been challenged in recent years by rising tuition at Stony Brook And through the whole country.

Ms McInnis said more than 50 per cent of Stony Brook students had their tuition fully covered by financial aid and government grants, but many struggled with the added costs of attending university.

“What our students struggle with is all the other costs associated with going to college, whether that’s room and board, or if they’re commuters, it could be commuting costs, it could be textbook costs,” she said. “Investing in our students is one of the ways we can spend this money in the future.”

But the effects of the gift won’t be immediate, she warned. Stony Brook will receive the full sum of $500 million over the course of seven years. It will also aim to raise an additional $200 million from other donors over the next three years to qualify for the maximum amount of state funding.

Mr. and Mrs. Simons have made other large gifts to Stony Brook in the past that, when combined with Thursday’s gift, amount to approximately $1.2 billion, Ms. McInnis said. She said Mr. Simons joined the faculty in 1968, when the university was only five years old.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. and Mrs. Simons said the state’s new endowment program convinced them to make a large unrestricted donation now. They also said the $500 million donation was an opportunity to express their gratitude to the university, which Ms. Simons said “was a transformation in my life”.

Raised in a working-class family, she graduated from college in 1974 and went on to earn a Ph.D. in economics. She said she hoped the gift would help people from “underserved communities” thrive at the school.

“I was very grateful when I was given the opportunity to attend Stony Brook University,” said Ms. Simons. “I commuted to the school with my brother and my cousin. They started laying bricks and I went to my math class.

Mr. Simons, who has appeared several times on the Forbes ranking of the richest people in the world, is a leading mathematician in addition to his work as a hedge fund manager. He said he formulated one of his most cited mathematical innovations, the Chern-Simons form, while teaching at the university.

That innovation, which he called “probably my best idea,” has been used by physicists to contribute to the development of quantum field theory. He also met his wife during his time at the school.

“It was all because I worked at Stony Brook,” he said. “So I am very fond of the university.”