Disney Delivers a Big Gift to CalArts : The arts: Its $8-million pledge is part of $30 million raised by the small but nationally respected school.

The Walt Disney Co. and several prominent benefactors have pledged $30 million to California Institute of the Arts for student scholarships and renovation of the small but nationally respected campus in Valencia.

CalArts is using these pledges to begin a $60-million fund-raising campaign, school officials announced Monday at a press conference at the City Club in downtown’s Wells Fargo Center.

Disney’s pledge of $8 million will pay to renovate the school’s Modular Theater, which, with its hydraulically adjustable floor, was one of the most technologically advanced facilities in the country when it opened 20 years ago. The $30 million includes the cost of 20 new art studios, which have already been constructed on campus as a gift from developer Eli Broad. Other pledges will buy video editing and graphic design equipment.

The majority of the money, however, will go to CalArts students and to the artists that the institute has traditionally hired as teachers. The school has a current enrollment of 1,000 students, 81% of whom are on full or partial scholarship to help pay the $12,000 annual tuition.

“Our $60-million goal would be ambitious for any institution. It’s more so for this one,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of Walt Disney Studios and a member of the institute’s board of trustees. “In this difficult time, it’s easy to think the arts can be dispensed with, but that would be a mistake.”

With this campaign, president Steven Lavine expands on the achievements of his predecessor, Robert Fitzpatrick, who brought the institute to national prominence during the 1980s largely through an ability to attract influential board members and raise money. Fitzpatrick left in 1987 to head Euro Disneyland.

CalArts hopes to raise the remainder of the $60 million within two years, Lavine said. Among the private benefactors who jump-started the campaign, Sharon Disney Lund pledged $5 million for scholarships, and faculty and staff salaries. Lulu May Von Hagen, a trustee emeritus, pledged a $1-million scholarship fund. San Marino businessman George Boone and his wife, Mary Lou, pledged $1 million for faculty creative leaves. Several smaller gifts make up the balance of the $30 million that has been pledged.

It was a $36-million gift from the Disney family that built the institute in 1970. CalArts was a daring and chaotic experiment: an art school with no walls, a place where dancers influenced painters and vice versa, where the masters were taught alongside radical experimentation.

Early students and administrators struggled through rough times, when reports of sex, drugs and nude swimming on campus overshadowed artistic exploits. At one point, the Disney family grew so frustrated that it offered USC, and then Pepperdine University, $10 million to take the school off its hands.

But CalArts’ unconventional bent and, more importantly, the success of alumni such as actor Ed Harris, director Tim Burton and artists Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl and Suzanne Lacy has paid off in recent years.