The 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier has donated $1 billion to a Bronx medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with instructions that the gift be used to cover tuition for all students in the future.
The donor, Dr. Ruth Gottesman is a former professor at Einstein, where she studied learning disabilities, developed a screening test, and ran literacy programs. It is one of the largest philanthropic gifts to an educational institution in the United States and possibly the largest to a medical school.
The fortune came from her late husband, David Gottesman, known as Sandy, who was a protégé of Warren Buffett and had made an early investment in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate that Mr. Buffett built.
The donation is notable not only for its staggering size, but also because it goes to a medical institution in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough. The Bronx has a high rate of premature deaths and ranks as the unhealthiest county in New York. Over the past generation, several billionaires have given hundreds of millions of dollars to more prestigious medical schools and hospitals in Manhattan, the city’s wealthiest borough.
Dr. Gottesman said her donation will allow young doctors to start their careers without the debt of medical school, which often exceeds $200,000. He also hoped it would broaden the student body to include people who otherwise could not afford to go to medical school.
While her husband ran an investment firm, First Manhattan, Dr. Gottesman had a long career at Einstein, a prestigious medical school, beginning in 1968 when she took a job as director of psychoeducational services. She has long been a member of Einstein’s board of directors and is currently the chair.
In recent years, she has become close friends with Dr. Philip Ozuah, the pediatrician who oversees the medical college and affiliated hospital, Montefiore Medical Center, as the health system’s CEO. That friendship and trust loomed large as she pondered what to do with the money her husband had left her.
In an interview Friday at Einstein’s campus in the Morris Park neighborhood, Dr. Ozuah and Dr. Gottesman talked about the donation, how it came about and what it would mean for Einstein’s medical students.
In early 2020, the two sat next to each other on a 6 a.m. flight to West Palm Beach, Florida. It was the first time they spent hours together.
They talked about their childhoods — hers in Baltimore, his, some 30 years later, in Nigeria — and what they had in common. Both had doctorates in education and had spent their careers at the same institution in the Bronx, helping children and families in need.
Dr. Ozuah described moving to New York, not knowing a single person in the state, and spending years as a community doctor in the South Bronx before rising to the top of medical school.
Leaving the airport, Dr. Ozuah offered his hand to Dr. Gottesman, then not quite 90, as they approached the curb. He waved at him and told him to “watch your step,” he recalls with a laugh.
Within weeks, the coronavirus brought the world to a standstill. Dr. Gottesman’s husband, in his 90s, became ill with the new pathogen and she had a mild case. Dr. Ozuah sent an ambulance to Gottesman’s home in Rye, New York, to bring them to Montefiore, the largest hospital in the Bronx.
In the weeks that followed, Dr Ozuah began making daily home visits – in full protective gear – to check on the couple as Mr Gottesman recovered. “That’s how the friendship developed,” he said. “I spent probably every day for about three weeks visiting them in Rye.”
About three years ago, Dr. Ozuah asked Dr. Gottesman to lead the medical school board. She had done the job before, but given her age, she was surprised. The gesture reminded her of the fable of the lion and the mouse, she told Dr. Ozuah at the time, explaining that when the lion spares the mouse’s life, the mouse says to him, “Maybe someday I can help you.”
In the story, the lion laughs haughtily. “But Phil didn’t go ‘ha, ha, ha,'” he noted with a smile.
The money
The husband of Dr. Gottesman died in 2022 at the age of 96. “He left me, unbeknownst to me, an entire portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway stocks,” he recalls. The instructions were simple: “Do whatever you think is right with it,” he recalls.
It was overwhelming to think about, so at first he didn’t. But her children encouraged her not to wait too long.
When he focused on the endowment, he immediately realized what he wanted to do, he recalls. “I wanted to fund students at Einstein so they could get free tuition,” he said. There was enough money to do this in perpetuity, he said.
Over the years, he had interviewed dozens of Einstein’s prospective medical students. Tuition is more than $59,000 a year, and many graduated with overwhelming medical school debt. According to the school, nearly 50 percent of its students owed more than $200,000 upon graduation. At most other New York medical schools, less than 25 percent of new doctors owed that much.
Nearly half of Einstein’s first-year medical students are New Yorkers, and nearly 60 percent are women. About 48 percent of current medical students at Einstein are white, 29 percent are Asian, 11 percent are Hispanic, and 5 percent are black.
Not only would future students be able to start their careers debt-free, but she hoped her donation would also allow a wider pool of aspiring doctors to apply to medical school. “We have terrific medical students, but this will open up a lot of other students whose financial situation is such that they wouldn’t even consider going to medical school,” he said.
“That’s what makes me so happy about this gift,” she added. “I have the opportunity to not just help Phil, but to help Montefiore and Einstein in a transformative way — and I’m so proud and so humbled — both — to be able to do that.”
Dr. Gottesman went to see Dr. Ozua in December to tell him that she would be making a significant gift. It reminded him of the story of the lion and the mouse. This, he explained, was the moment of the mouse.
“If someone said, ‘I’m going to give you a transformative gift for medical school,’ what would you do?” asked.
There were probably three things, Dr. Ozuah said.
“One,” he began, “you could have the education for free—”
“That’s what I want to do,” he said. He never mentioned the other ideas.
Dr. Gottesman sometimes wonders what her late husband would have thought of her decision.
“I hope he’s smiling and not frowning,” she said with a laugh. “But he gave me the chance to do that and I think he would be happy – I hope so.”
Einstein won’t be the first medical school to eliminate tuition.
In 2018, New York University announced that it would begin offering free tuition to medical students and saw an increase in applications.
Name
Dr. Gottesman was reluctant to attach her name to her donation. “Nobody needs to know,” Dr. recalled. Ozuah who originally said. But Dr Ozuah insisted others might find her life inspiring. “Here is someone who is totally devoted to the welfare of others and wants no discrimination, no recognition,” Dr Ozuah said.
Dr. Ozuah noted that the current price to get your name on a medical school or hospital was perhaps one-fifth of Dr.’s donation. Gottesman. Cornell Medical College and New York Hospital now bear the name of Sanford Weill, the former head of Citigroup. New York University Medical Center was renamed for Ken Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot. Both men offered hundreds of millions of dollars.
But it is a condition of Dr. Gottesman’s gift that Einstein College of Medicine not change its name. Albert Einstein, the physicist who developed the theory of relativity, agreed to name the medical school, which opened in 1955, after him.
The name, he noted, couldn’t be beat. “We have the name of god – we have Albert Einstein.”
