Two Universities Receive $100-Million Each in Gifts

Two universities each received gifts of $100-million this month:

• Brown University has been given $100-million from the billionaire businessman Sidney E. Frank to endow a scholarship fund for undergraduate students.
• The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is the beneficiary of a $100-million pledge from Stephen M. Ross, a New York real-estate developer, for its business school. Half of the gift will be paid over the next few years, and the rest will be given to the university after Mr. Ross dies.

Mr. Frank attended Brown for a year in the late 1930s, but left because he couldn’t afford to pay tuition. Today he is worth more than $1.6-billion, according to Forbes magazine. His liquor-importing company sold Grey Goose vodka to Bacardi for $2-billion in August.

The scholarship gift is Mr. Frank’s second to Brown in four months. He donated $20-million in May to build an academic center on the university’s Providence, R.I., campus. However, Mr. Frank, a New Rochelle, N.Y., resident, had previously given the university very little money: His only other donation on record was $100 to the university’s annual fund in 1977, a college official said.

Mr. Frank’s latest gift will provide financial aid to about 130 students at a time, the university reported.

Michigan Donation

The University of Michigan will use its gift to pay for the redesign and partial reconstruction of the business school’s campus and for its endowment.

Mr. Ross, who graduated from the University of Michigan in 1962 with an undergraduate business degree, is chairman of the Related Companies, which built the Time Warner Center, in New York. The gift will be included as part of the business school’s $350-million capital campaign.

In a statement, Mr. Ross said he is giving the money so that the business school can build “fine, functional, and aesthetic facilities that make it possible for people to do their best work.”

The university has renamed its school the Stephen M. Ross School of Business.

Previously, Mr. Ross had given the university $5-million for a new athletic center, $1-million to endow a professorship, and $50,000 for a humanities fellowship.