If the news of the Gottesman gift was met with such admiration and excitement, it was partly because it seemed to drown out the noise of the transaction that was ringing around so much generosity. It’s rarely been louder than in recent months, when some of the most successful people on Wall Street have been pushing to oust university presidents whose ideologies and management styles don’t align with their own.
“There’s a wonderful humility to the story,” observed Amir Pasic, dean of Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, especially given what he described as a “change in sentiment” among donors, who see giving as an investment rather than as “a community process”. This dynamic is much more prevalent now than it was 20 years ago.
Einstein’s gift is the third largest ever made to an institution of higher education. (Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins, his alma mater, tops the list.) Einstein will not replace his namesake to be named the Ruth Gottesman College of Medicine, nor does his benefactor appear to require any other form. great institutional respect.
Ruth Gottesman has been involved with the school for more than 55 years, first as a specialist in the diagnosis and treatment of learning disabilities and then as an administrator. Dr. Gottesman knew, as Mr. Pasic put it, “how the sausage was made on a very intimate level.” What he particularly noticed was the grunt—how difficult it was, particularly for anyone hoping to go into primary care, to leave school saddled with the kind of debt that a $59,000-a-year tuition can bring. Nearly half of students at Einstein end up owing $200,000 or more when they leave.
The cost of a medical education is a major factor leading to a shortage of doctors that Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, president of the American Medical Association, has called a national crisis. In an October speech to the National Press Club, he said the physician shortage in the United States could rise to at least 37,000 over the next decade and could reach 100,000. Some of the greatest needs are in family medicine, where pay is typically much lower than among the various specialties. Last year, 217 family medicine residency positions were vacant, the most of any category. In comparison, anesthesiology had only one vacancy — there were no special qualifications for plastic surgeons.
