Geffen Gift to Aid People, Programs, UCLA Says

Fresh from announcing a record $200-million pledge for their medical school, UCLA officials Tuesday were understandably giddy.

But when it comes to spending the new cash from entertainment mogul David Geffen, the school’s administrators promise to take a sober, go-slow approach.

The $200 million is a landmark gift, but it won’t come in a lump sum and, in the costly world of medical education and research, it won’t be enough to finance a spending spree.

Although UCLA officials declined to give specifics, one knowledgeable source said the payments from Geffen would stretch over about a decade.

UCLA’s plan is to spread the money over time on a variety of purposes, such as student financial aid, scientists’ training and research.

The money will be put in the school’s endowment fund, and once it reaches the full $200 million, it will generate around $10 million a year in income. That’s no piddling sum, but just a fraction of the school’s $693-million annual operating budget.

“It’s sizable, but it’s not so huge that it dominates all of their activities by any stretch. It’s not like you get to spend the $200 million all in one year, much less every year,” said Michael Morrisey, a health-care economist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

On the other hand, UCLA emphasized that the Geffen money is unrestricted, unlike the vast majority of the medical school’s endowment, which totaled $587 million as of the middle of last year. As such, UCLA officials said, the university will have a free hand to put the money to the best possible use.

Though plans are in flux, “We do not want to use this money for bricks and mortar,” said Dr. Gerald S. Levey, dean of UCLA’s medical school. “This is a gift for programs, for faculty and for students.”

Whether they put their money to work quickly or over the long term, other medical schools that have received large donations say they were left forever changed--either physically or in their long-term aspirations.

Cornell University launched an aggressive hiring and renovation program after receiving $100million from financier Sanford I. Weill and his wife, Joan, in 1998, along with another $100 million from the same couple this year. The school was renamed for them.

Dr. Antonio M. Gotto Jr., the school’s dean, said the first $100million helped launch a campaign to build its basic sciences program. The school has recruited 20 new faculty members and renovated 25% of its research space. It also has created a new gene therapy lab and an imaging center.

The Weills’ second $100-million gift began a drive to raise $750 million for clinical programs.

“There were some complaints initially from some of the alumni for changing the name” of the school, Gotto said. “But when they saw what a transforming effect a gift of this magnitude could have, most of them quickly became supporters.”

But Gotto, who served as a resident with UCLA’s Levey at Massachusetts General Hospital decades ago, said that the money has been coming in over several years and that it has taken time to make changes. “It took about a year before one could really see the effects of it,” he said.

UCLA is more likely to follow the example of USC, where changes have come far more slowly. USC’s medical school received a $110-million gift from the W.M. Keck Foundation in 1999--the largest to a medical school until Geffen’s this week. Because the Keck money went into the medical school’s endowment, it is being put to use over the long term rather than being used at once for new programs or buildings.

USC used the Keck gift as leverage to begin construction on a $60-million neurogenetic institute that will open later this year. The school subsequently conducted a fund-raising campaign to recoup the cost of the building and return the Keck funds to the endowment.

But the Keck gift has had even more significant intangible benefits, said Dr. Stephen J. Ryan, dean of the renamed Keck School of Medicine.

“We have a telephone book of plans that would not have been conceivable if it were not for the Keck gift,” Ryan said. Now, “we have timelines on all of these things taking us to 2009.”

Ryan added that the Geffen gift to UCLA “benefits academic medicine overall because it raises the bar” for donations.

The size of Geffen’s gift inspired top medical school deans. Harvard Medical School said such grants help universities support researchers whose disciplines are too new to generate funding from the National Institutes of Health.

“Were we to be the recipient of a grant like that, it would certainly put our dean in the position to make a leap into absolutely new ground, to fund research that is too new to be funded through the peer-reviewed process,” said Eric Buehrens, executive dean for administration at the school, which has an endowment of $1.9 billion.

But would the medical school’s name be changed if it got a $200- million gift? “I can’t conceive of a circumstance under which the Harvard Medical School would be renamed,” Buehrens said.