UC Berkeley Gets $15 Million From Levi Strauss Owners for New School

In the largest single personal donation ever to UC Berkeley, the Haas family, whose fortune began by selling blue jeans to Gold Rush miners, is donating $15 million to help build a new business school on campus.

The gift from the Haas family, owners of Levi Strauss & Co., is the cornerstone gift for the planned $40-million School of Business Administration. The donation, announced at a meeting of UC regents here Friday, is the largest single gift to the Berkeley campus and equals the largest in the UC system, officials said.

The new school is to be named after the late Walter A. Haas, former president of the San Francisco-based clothing company. He was an alumnus of the UC Berkeley division that became the business school and himself a major donor to the campus.

‘Devoted to Berkeley’

“Our family has always been devoted to Berkeley, no one more so than our late father,” said Rhoda Haas Goldman. “He would be most pleased to know that his family is continuing his legacy of support to the university he so dearly loved.”

Goldman and her brother, Peter Haas, chairman of the Executive Committee of Levi Strauss, appeared at the regents meeting Friday and were loudly applauded. Their brother and co-donator, Walter Haas Jr., owner of the Oakland A’s baseball team, was not present. All three siblings are alumni of UC Berkeley.

According to UC officials, the Haas donation equals that given two years ago by businessman John E. Anderson to build a new Graduate School of Management at UCLA. The UCLA school, to be named after Anderson, is expected to open in 1994.

Complaints About Facilities

The Berkeley business school now shares a building with other departments, and students and faculty complain about outdated facilities. UC Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman said the school now “is as poorly housed as any major business school in the United States.”

The Haas school will be on the eastern edge of the campus on the site of a student health clinic, which will moved. Construction is expected to start in early 1991, with a hoped-for completion in fall, 1992.

UC Berkeley tied for ninth place with Columbia University in a 1987 ranking of the best business schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Stanford placed first and UCLA 13th.

Raymond E. Miles, dean of the Berkeley business school, said the new 200,000-square-foot building will allow more interaction between students and the business community. It will include a large conference center and computerized research facilities.

“It is an investment in continued excellence,” Miles said of the Haas gift.

Levi Strauss & Co. was founded by its German-Jewish patriarch who moved West in 1850 to sell dry goods to miners. The pants he made from tent canvas came to be known as Levis.

Strauss and his heirs, now mainly the Haas family, have long been prominent in Northern California civic, educational and charitable efforts.

Levi Strauss & Co. is privately held and reported a net income of $111.9 million on sales of $3.1 billion in 1988.

The new business school is to be built totally with private funds, officials said. The school now has 560 undergraduates, 540 graduate students and 120 faculty members. Officials said enrollment will not grow after the new building is done. The school is known for its interdisciplinary programs with engineering, law, public health, Asian studies and environmental design.

Largest Donations

While record amounts for UC, the Haas and Anderson gifts are far from being the largest private donations to higher education in recent years.

Orange County industrialist Arnold O. Beckman and his wife, Mabel, gave $50 million in 1987 to his alma mater, Caltech. In 1986, David Packard, co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard Co. electronics firm, pledged $70 million to Stanford University, and his partner, William Hewlett, gave Stanford $50 million the same year.