Stanford Donations

Charles Schwab & Co., EBay Inc., investment firm General Atlantic Partners and other firms and individuals this month pledged $20 million to fund a new e-commerce center at Stanford University Business School. The Center for Electronic Business and Commerce will develop new courses for business school students, who are already required to take e-commerce courses. It joins such centers at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University. The center will be led by business school professors Garth Saloner and Haim Mendelson.

“We think this is an area that cannot be separated from the rest of school,” Mendelson said. In five years, the curriculum should be melded into the main business school course work, he said. Stanford has been a prime educational beneficiaries of the Internet boom because many of the leading companies were started by alumni in the area or even then-students. Annual private donations to the university regularly exceed $300 million. In October, Netscape co-founder Jim Clark said he would donate $150 million to Stanford for work on biomedical engineering.