UNITED STATES

University to land one of largest gifts to a US university
Stony Brook University, a public school on Long Island, received a donation of US$500 million on Thursday 1 June from the Simons Foundation, formed by an alumnus and a former faculty member, making it the recipient of one of the largest gifts to a university in American history, writes Liam Stack for The New York Times.The donation, which will go toward the school’s endowment, will also trigger another US$200 million injection of public funds under a donation matching programme passed as part of the New York State budget in April. The school said it hopes the gift will spur other donations that could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Gifts of that size are rare for universities, and especially so for public institutions like Stony Brook, which is one of the flagship schools of the State University of New York. The donation plus the state matching funds amount to nearly twice the amount of Stony Brook’s current endowment of US$370 million, the university president, Maurie McInnis, said in an interview.
Full report on The New York Times site