Hundreds of medical students had packed into a lecture hall in the Bronx when a former professor at their college rose to make what proved to be the most popular address of the year, or perhaps of any year.
Dr Ruth Gottesman, 94, had come before them to announce that she was giving their college $1 billion — a gift billed as the largest to any medical school in history. “I am delighted to share with you that starting in August this year, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine will be tuition-free,” she said.
There followed a sudden outbreak of euphoria in the hall, as students leapt to their feet and clapped madly. Some wept and hugged one another. Tuition fees at the college are $63,000 a year: many graduates begin their careers with more than $200,000 of debt.
Thanks to Gottesman’s gift, those who were in their final year at the college would now be reimbursed the fee they had paid for this term, the college said. And after this summer, none of the others, or any future generation of students, would be required to pay anything at all.
The announcement recalled a speech by the financier, Robert Smith, who told the graduating class of Morehouse College in 2019 that he would pay off their loan debt with a gift of $34 million, and an even more lavish gift by the businessman and former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who gave $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University to create a fund to help poorer students to attend his alma mater.
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The latest gift came from an emeritus professor of pediatrics at the college, who created a screening programme for learning disabilities that helped tens of thousands of children. She later founded an adult literacy programme, according to the university.
The fact that Gottesman was then able to give the college $1 billion may have come as a surprise to her colleagues. It was apparently a surprise to her too. In a statement she said she was “very grateful to my late husband, Sandy”, who died in 2022, “for leaving these funds in my care”.
David Gottesman, known as Sandy, served in the south Pacific in the Second World War and later founded an investment firm called First Manhattan. He also became a close friend of the legendary investor Warren Buffett. In the mid-1960s the two men and one other partner bought a Baltimore department store but then decided that they had made a mistake, according to an obituary of Gottesman.
Gottesman managed to sell the store at a small loss and his share of the recouped funds went instead into stock in Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate. He would later calculate that this stock grew, in the four and a half decades that followed, to be worth about 6,000 times its initial value.
His widow told The New York Times that “he left me, unbeknownst to me, a whole portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway stock”, with only an instruction to “do whatever you think is right with it.”
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She was by then the head of the board of trustees at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She had been asked to serve in that role in 2020 by Philip Ozuah, a paediatrician who oversees the college and an affiliated hospital. Gottesman said the request to serve when she was in her early nineties had made her recall the fable of the lion who lets a mouse live and is later repaid by the much smaller mammal. Like the mouse in the story, she had told Ozuah that “maybe someday I’ll be able to help you”, she said.
In December, she told him she was ready to do so and asked what might be done at the college with “a transformative gift”. He began to set out three options, the first of which was to make tuition free, at which point she interrupted. “That’s what I want to do,” she said.
