UCSD Considers Naming School to Woo Donation : Fund-Raising: Administrators sound out medical faculty on idea, with a Utah multimillionaire in mind.

Facing state and federal funding cuts, officials at UC San Diego Medical School are considering a rare fund-raising method--renaming the school for a private donor willing to jump-start the facility’s private endowment with a grant of $25 million or more.

Top university administrators have sounded out key medical school professors about their reaction to UCSD approaching a donor with such a proposition, since the naming of a major campus professional school is rare at any campus and would be unprecedented at the 30-year old UCSD.

Knowledgeable sources within the medical school told The Times that the school has identified a controversial Salt Lake City multimillionaire medical devices inventor, James L. Sorenson, as a possible donor, although no formal negotiations have taken place. Medical school Dean Dr. Gerald Burrow declined to either confirm or deny consideration of any specific individual, saying only that he has begun conversations with faculty members to determine whether they would approve of an approach to a “naming donor.”

The mention of Sorenson around the medical school has generated apprehension among several professors because of a series of embarrassing events at the University of Utah in 1989.

The president of the University of Utah accepted a $15-million stock donation from Sorenson for its medical school in June, 1989, in return for naming the university’s medical school and hospital after him. Sorenson was named one of America’s richest men by Forbes Magazine in 1990, with an estimated worth of $525 million.

But more than 100 professors, as well as leading members of the Salt Lake City community, raised strident objections to the agreement with Sorenson, in part because of a lack of consultation before the deal and in part because Sorenson’s only ties to the university were financial ones. The opposition became so vehement that the university told Sorenson it could not honor the original agreement to name the school after him. Sorenson then asked for, and was granted, the return of his donation.

Sorenson did not return phone calls last week to his Salt Lake City clothing manufacturing firm, one of his various businesses. A spokesman for Sorenson, John Ward, said that Sorenson “has had no formal discussions with UCSD,” and that, if there are to be discussions, “Jim will not propose these things. . . . He listens to a lot of proposals, but he is not actively going around to schools” offering endowments.

Burrow said last week that he could not “give any details involving potential gifts to the university.” But he did confirm that the medical school “is evaluating the possibility of seeking a naming gift for the school, and we are in consultation with the faculty.

“We have to get their response . . . to see if they will support it at the campus level, before making an approach to a major (potential) donor.” Subsequent negotiations would at some point involve Chancellor Richard C. Atkinson, who is considered one of the best fund-raisers among his UC campus colleagues. Atkinson did not return a phone call for comment this week.

Burrow said faculty members are discussing what minimum dollar amount would be required, what restrictions should or should not be placed on such a major donation and how such a gift would be structured.

Burrow said some faculty members have recommended that the university “not consider anything less than $25 million” in allowing the school to be named for an individual. The largest private gift ever to UCSD was $6 million, given in 1987 by the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation of Delaware for a new aquarium under construction at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The university’s private endowment totals $45 million.

In 1989, the university announced that a new acute-care hospital at the campus would be named for John and Sally Thornton in recognition of their $5-million gift toward the $65-million facility.

But Burrow acknowledged that the naming of an entire school is a much more complicated and sensitive issue.

“We are nowhere near the end of any process,” Burrow said. “We haven’t approached a donor. . . . Any approach so far has been peripheral.”

But some faculty members, who asked not to be identified, said the name of Sorenson has been mentioned. One professor said there has been discussion of how to structure a $25-million gift, which could generate as much as $2 million a year in dividends or interest for research and other medical school purposes.

“The issue of how we would feel about a naming gift has been raised with people within the department of medicine,” another professor said. “And I don’t think the discussions were meant to be theoretical, they really want to know what we think for real . . . and I think the whole issue causes a bit of discomfort.”

Although the professor said that there are precedents around the country for naming professional schools after major contributors, “You would have to make sure that criteria are clear, such as whether the person should or should not be associated with the university, or with science.”

Such concerns include whether a $25-million grant would be enough for a renaming, given the $100-million annual budget of the medical school and its physical plant worth multiples of that.

Without a clear consensus over a particular candidate, the professor said, the UCSD reaction would be “hot fusion,” a reference to the controversial cold fusion research at the University of Utah.

Dr. David Bailey, chairman of the department of pathology, said “there has been no proposal that he has seen in writing” but declined comment on any oral discussions other than to say that “our policy is to consider donations.”

Dr. Stephen Wasserman, chairman of the school’s department of medicine, said that Burrow has asked him to discuss with faculty “the concept of a naming gift to get a general feel from (professors) before (the dean) goes on to specifics.” The importance of the issue led Wasserman to call the school’s dermatology division chairman in Germany earlier this spring, where she was doing research.

“I was told that somebody might want to give a significant amount of money and was asked if the different chairs would go along with it,” Dr. Irma Gigli said. “These are complicated issues. Funding is not going to be exuberant for several years, and you have to consider people,” she said, declining to offer her opinion on the appropriateness of a “naming gift.”

Burrow said that, “in our initial conversations, if there had been a flat ‘no’ from the (department) chairs, we would have ended it right there.” Burrows lamented that any publicity about potential donors could complicate the university’s approach to any potential donor “as well as making faculty discussion more difficult” because some professors might infer that top administrators want to present “a done deal” to them.

The 70-year-old Sorenson, a native of Rexburg, Ida., grew up in California. He began as a pharmaceutical salesman, then co-founded Deseret Pharmaceutical, a company that patented numerous medical devices, including disposable surgical masks and catheters. The company was sold to Abbott Labs in 1980 for Abbott stock worth at least $100 million at the time, Sorenson’s spokesman said.