Three Big Gifts Made to Colleges

An anonymous donor has given Rutgers University $27-million, the largest gift in the New Jersey institution’s history, to establish 18 professorships, reports The Daily Targum, a campus newspaper.

The gift covers half the cost of endowing the new faculty positions in business, mathematics, and the sciences and must be matched. The donors who provide sufficient matches will get rights to name the faculty seats.

The biggest previous gift raised by the institution was $13-million.

In other higher-education news:

• A Yale University alumnus who now runs a West Coast financial firm has given his alma mater $25-million to open a center for the study of renewable fuels, Bloomberg writes.

Richard Levin, Yale’s president, said the new Energy Sciences Institute created with the gift from Thomas Steyer and his wife, Kathryn Taylor, will draw on the school’s scientific resources “to find new and better ways to convert the sun’s energy into fuel.”

Mr. Steyer, a 1979 Yale graduate, founded the San Francisco investment firm Farallon Capital Management and is now managing director of Hellman & Friedman, a private-equity group.

• Detroit’s Wayne State University will dedicate its renovated chemistry building Friday to a faculty member who donated $11-million for the project, writes the Detroit Free Press.

A. Paul Schaap, a chemistry professor, and his wife, Carol, have given the university an additional $6-million to pay for student and faculty research. In the early 1980s Mr. Schaap developed a molecule that produced light similar to that given off by a firefly. With Wayne State’s backing he spun off his research into a successful business that uses the luminescence in medical testing procedures.