05/24/95

CONTACT: Stanford University News Service (650) 723-2558

Stanford receives gift of $8 million for Restoration Fund

STANFORD -- Stanford University's continuing recovery from the October 1989 earthquake received a major boost Wednesday, May 17, when an alumnus and his wife anonymously gave $8 million to the Stanford Restoration Fund, President Gerhard Casper announced.

In making the gift, the donors said they were motivated by their gratitude for the outstanding educational, cultural and open-space land-use opportunities that Stanford has presented to them and their children, and by their appreciation of the Quad as the historic center of campus.

They also applauded the university's attention to its own history, exemplified by restoring Memorial Church and the Red Barn of the founders' Palo Alto Stock Farm, and by providing cooperation on restoring the Leland Stanford Mansion in Sacramento as a California State Parks site for public use.

In accepting the gift, Casper said, "In a 1913 letter, David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford, wrote, 'The yellow sandstone arches and cloisters, the red-tiled roofs against the azure sky, make a picture that can never be forgotten, itself an integral part of a Stanford education.'

"This wonderful gift, to help restore those arches, cloisters and roofs, is a direct contribution to the education of current and future Stanford students," Casper said. "Our classrooms and laboratories are an invaluable endowment from the past, and Stanford is indeed fortunate to have such dedicated alumni and friends to restore and maintain them for the future."

The Stanford Restoration Fund supplements university reserves, and federal and state disaster relief funding, in completing recovery from the Loma Prieta earthquake, which damaged 242 buildings on campus.

Areas that still require significant repair work, as well as retrofitting and strengthening, include large sections of the Main Quad, Green Library West and the Stanford University Museum of Art.

The campuswide earthquake recovery is expected to cost a total of $200 million when completed near the end of the decade. The goal of the Stanford Restoration Fund is to raise a total of $50 million in gifts. Almost $23 million has been raised to date.

When the fund was created in 1994, Casper noted that an entire undergraduate class had gone through Stanford without having access to dozens of classrooms, vital library materials and the museum, and said the university was making the Stanford Restoration Fund its top fundraising priority.

Also badly damaged in the earthquake were Memorial Church and the Graduate School of Business; those structures and a number of buildings in the Main Quad already have been repaired and/or retrofitted, in large part due to the generosity of donors, Casper said.

As part of the Stanford Restoration Fund efforts, major donors can choose to have their names associated with various buildings, rooms and courtyards on campus. However, the money given is not restricted to use on, nor does it necessarily signify the costs associated with, any particular area.

All major donors, including contributors to the rebuilding of Memorial Church, will have their names inscribed on a plaque that will be dedicated in the Inner Quad at the completion of the project.

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