Caltech to Receive Largest Gift Ever
Gordon E. Moore, the billionaire co-founder of Intel Corp. and a longtime supporter of Caltech, will give the school two gifts totaling $600 million, the largest donation ever to an American university.
“I’m just so grateful, I don’t have words for it,” Caltech President and Nobel laureate David Baltimore said of the donation, which was made public Saturday. “It is an amazing gift, really the most wonderful thing that could happen to Caltech.”
Baltimore said the gift from Moore and his wife, Betty, will be used to fund a “wish list” of scientific initiatives and projects at the Pasadena school, generally considered one of the world’s leading research institutions. It could go toward anything from designing a telescope bigger and more powerful than any now in existence to constructing a plate boundary observatory for geologists to study the movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates.
Although many specifics have yet to be negotiated, Baltimore said other possibilities include major initiatives by biologists working to better understand human consciousness and by chemists exploring more systematic methods of making large molecules.
The university also is looking at how it might strengthen its computer science offerings and develop a management program to wed its scientific prowess to areas of finance and economics.
Half of the Moores’ donation will come directly from the Silicon Valley pioneer and his wife and half from the San Francisco-based foundation they established less than a year ago.
The gift was announced to Caltech trustees during a weekend board meeting in Palm Springs. Reached there Friday before the news was made public, Moore, 72, said the gift was intended to keep the institution at the forefront of science and technology.
“I’ve retained a real interest fairly broadly in what goes on in science and technology, and Caltech has been a leading participant in that,” he said.
Although he has made donations to other universities over the years, Moore said he wanted to focus his most significant investment at a single institution.
In fact, his is the latest in a series of extraordinary donations to individual institutions of higher education in the United States.
But it easily surpasses record-setting gifts of $360 million to New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in March from an anonymous donor and $400 million to Stanford University in May from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, according to a list kept by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The donation is topped only by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ $1-billion gift in 1999 to establish a scholarship fund for minority students--a sum that did not go to any specific campus.
Education experts said the string of huge gifts, which also includes a $350-million donation last year to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from Patrick J. and Lore Harp McGovern, may have more to do with the 1990s’ stock market boom--especially for technology entrepreneurs--than with any real change in patterns of giving to higher education.
The experts said the Moores’ largess to Caltech should provide some hope to other universities and their fund-raisers at a time of economic uncertainty made worse by the recent terrorist attacks. There is no guarantee such generosity can continue, however, with the stock market and the technology sector struggling to recover.
“What these gifts will do is not only help a very important institution like Caltech but reinforce the overall importance and value of giving to higher education,” said John Lippincott, vice president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, a Washington-based nonprofit. “The timing could not be better.”
Baltimore said he did not think the Moores set out to top all previous donations with their gift, although he said the public relations value of the record became apparent as the negotiations went forward.
At first it was not clear how much the couple’s direct contribution would be, because it is in stock, and its value fluctuates over time. Baltimore said that although he cannot disclose exactly how much stock the Moores are giving, the assumptions that have been made about its long-term value are “quite conservative.” The commitment from the foundation is a fixed cash amount, he said.
University and foundation officials said the $300 million from the Moores will arrive in installments during the next five years, and the $300 million from the foundation over the next 10 years.
Specific uses for the foundation’s share will be negotiated, and the Moores’ direct gift is largely unrestricted, officials said.
Moore said he and his wife reserve the right to “poke our noses in every once in a while to see what they’re thinking about doing.” Beyond that, he said, “we trust the Caltech administration to figure it out.”
Baltimore said the gifts would energize the entire campus and allow the university to remain competitive with other institutions in the increasingly ferocious struggle to attract the nation’s top students and faculty members.
“We were euphoric, not because this was the top gift but because of the amount of money relative to the size of Caltech, and the things we’d be able to do with it,” he said.
The gifts will “help enormously in realizing our research dreams,” said Baltimore, a biologist who has led the school since 1997.
Caltech has about 2,000 students, slightly more than half of them graduate students. It manages NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as major observatories in Southern California and Hawaii.
Moore said he was delighted to be able to help Caltech, where he received a doctorate in chemistry and physics in 1954, after earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from UC Berkeley.
An informal, engaging man known to employees and college presidents alike simply as “Gordon,” Moore is perhaps best known for Moore’s Law, the prediction he made in 1965 that the number of transistors--and power--that could be squeezed onto a computer chip would double each year, even as costs declined. He later modified the maxim to every two years, and it proved so accurate that it has become a guiding principle for his industry.
In 1968, after working at two early chip developers, Shockley Semiconductor and Fairchild Semiconductor, Moore and partner Robert Noyce started Intel. In May, after spending 23 years at the company, including 12 as chief executive, Moore stepped down as Intel’s board chairman.
He stood at 29th on Forbes magazine’s most recent list of the nation’s wealthiest citizens, with a net worth of $5.3 billion. Along with those of other high-tech leaders, however, Moore’s fortune, which Forbes put at $26 billion in 2000, has declined precipitously in the last year as technology stocks plunged.
Intel, the top maker of semiconductors that power personal computers and communications equipment, reported sharply lower sales and profits in the just-ended third quarter compared with a year earlier, but officials said they expect business to hold steady or improve slightly in the months ahead.
Moore has served on Caltech’s board of trustees for 18 years. And even before the latest gift, Caltech officials said, Moore and his wife of 51 years had donated some $50 million to the university, including a $16.5-million grant for an engineering laboratory that bears their name and other funds for undergraduate scholarships and faculty research.
But Moore said the couple had long wanted to do more for Caltech and have been particularly impressed with its faculty’s ability to do collaborative, innovative research that leaps the boundaries between academic disciplines.
“At Caltech, perhaps uniquely because of its small size, there’s a lot of cross-fertilization between the disciplines, with physicists eating lunch with biologists, and a lot of wonderful creativity going on,” Moore said.
