Wealthier & Wiser

Though a college thrives on scholarship, it survives on charity. Happily announcing the biggest gifts in their history last week, two of the top schools in the U.S. looked confidently forward to converting the cash into academic achievement.

Smith College, largest of the elite Seven Sisters,* received $3,000,000 for a new science center from New Yorker W. Van Alan Clark, honorary board chairman of Avon Products, and his wife, Smith Alumna Edna McConnell Clark, whose father started the door-to-door-sales cosmetics company. Smith was founded in 1871 on the theory that women deserved--and needed--the same intensive education available to men. Though about half the students major in the humanities, the school has traditionally been strong in science; among those receiving honorary degrees from Smith in June were Marion Spencer Fay, president of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, and Anna Young Whiting (Smith, Class of 1916), a geneticist at the Oak Ridge, Tenn., atomic laboratory. Smith's early graduates in science included the first woman to be named a full professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, Florence Rena Sabin, and Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, a noted child welfare specialist and the mother of Smith's current president, Thomas C. Mendenhall. The Clarks' gift, said Mendenhall, would not only expand the flow of women graduates into science but would also improve the "general literacy" of the student body. With the record windfall, Smith in only 15 months has fulfilled its three-year goal of raising $7,500,000, can now collect a Ford Foundation challenge grant worth $2,500,000.

Even more munificent was a pledge of $9,000,000 in stocks to Cornell University, which has embarked on a campaign to raise $73.2 million to celebrate its centennial this year. Donor: Maxwell

M. Upson, 88, retired board chairman of Raymond International, a far-flung heavy-construction company. An 1899 Cornell graduate in mechanical engineering, Upson is a self-made man. He stipulated only that $500,000 of his gift be used to establish a "professorship in the free-enterprise system."

*The others: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Vassar, Wellesley.

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