‘Transformative’ donation to UCSF: $500 million
The Helen Diller Foundation is pledging $500 million to UCSF — the biggest gift in campus history and among the largest to any public university in the United States — to recruit faculty and students and fund “high-risk, high-reward” research.
The gift, to be announced Thursday, comes on top of a series of hefty donations to the school over the past decade, including a previous $35 million contribution to support cancer research from Diller, a philanthropist who died in 2015 at her home in Woodside, and two $100 million gifts from Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne Benioff, for the UCSF children’s hospital.
The donation matches in size one made last year by Nike co-founder Phil Knight to the University of Oregon, which was at the time the largest in history to a public university.
The bulk of the donation, $400 million, will go toward recruiting and retaining top faculty and students and will increase UCSF’s $2.25 billion endowment by 18 percent.
Half of this new money will create a funding stream to support UCSF faculty looking toward leadership positions as well as the recruitment of senior professors from other institutions.
Diller’s daughter, Jackie Safier, said the unrestricted money is a sign of the confidence her mother had in the leadership at UCSF and the work of the doctors and scientists there.
Hawgood said the unrestricted gift is critical at a time of pinched federal funding, when available money tends to go toward research that is relatively conservative and has a good chance of success.
The discretionary money will allow the university to invest in the most exciting fields of research, which will in turn draw innovative students and faculty to its ranks, Hawgood said.
More money for students, they said, means the university can recruit talented young people who may not be able to afford advanced education, and allow them to graduate with little or no student debt.
The Diller gift won’t just provide the money to lure new faculty and retain young stars, he said, but also is “a really important statement, too.”
Safier said her mother was dedicated to philanthropy in education and children’s needs, but had a special affection for the university.