Keller’s $25 million, Alpers’ $5 million will add to GSB’s $175 million capital campaign

The combined gifts of $30 million made by Dennis Keller (M.B.A., ’68) and Andrew Alper (A.B., ’80, M.B.A., ’81), which the University announced last week, add to a multimillion-dollar capital campaign for the Graduate School of Business. Keller and Alper, who also are University Trustees, will co-chair the campaign.

“Our gifts and this campaign will ensure that the Graduate School of Business will continue to have the stellar faculty, programs and facilities needed to train the business leaders of tomorrow in an ever-more complex, competitive and integrated world economy,” said Keller, chairman and chief executive officer of DeVry Inc. and co-founder of Keller Graduate School of Management Inc.

Keller has pledged an unprecedented $25 million gift, and Alper, chief operating officer of the investment banking division of Goldman, Sachs & Co., and his wife, Sharon Sadow Alper (A.B., ’80, J.D., ’84), will make a $5 million gift. The University made its official announcement Monday, Jan. 24, at a brunch at the Gleacher Center, where the GSB has a downtown campus.

“The excellence of the University and its Graduate School of Business was created by the vision of our founders and maintained for more than a century by the generosity of our alumni and other friends,” said President Sonnenschein.

“With these gifts, Dennis Keller and Andy and Sharon Sadow Alper have shown that they share this vision for excellence in education and research. They have set a standard for generosity and support that will be remembered and that will inspire us for generations to come,” he said.

Keller’s and Alper’s gifts precede their work as co-chairs of the $175 million capital campaign, a portion of which will fund a new business school campus at 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue.

Robert Hamada, the Edward Eagle Brown Distinguished Service Professor and Dean of the GSB, said these recent gifts and other future gifts will provide more than a new home for the GSB faculty and its full-time M.B.A. students. “In addition to funding construction of a new integrated campus for the Graduate School of Business, the gifts we receive during this campaign will endow new professorships and create faculty research centers in entrepreneurship and marketing,” said Hamada. “Scholarships to help us attract the best students are also an important part of this capital campaign.”

Alper added, “By enhancing the physical aspects of the school and expanding its intellectual resources, we can ensure that Chicago GSB will continue its unparalleled history of excellence.”

Roger Shepard, Associate Dean for External Affairs at the GSB, explained how the fund-raising campaign will proceed. “We are in the final few weeks of what is known as the ‘quiet phase’ of the capital campaign, during which we are approaching a handful of donors for leadership gifts,” he said. “The so-called ‘public phase’ of the campaign begins March 1 and continues through the end of 2004.”

In addition to the gifts announced last week, other gifts received during the “quiet phase” of the campaign include $12 million from Robert Rothman (M.B.A., ’77), chairman and chief executive officer of Black Diamond Capital Corp.; $2 million to name and endow the recently created Kilts Center for Marketing from Jim Kilts (M.B.A., ’74) in conjunction with Nabisco, the company for which he is president and chief executive officer; and a gift to endow a professorship from Jerry Levin (M.B.A., ’68), chief executive officer of Sunbeam Corporation.

Keller said that by March 1, a campaign steering committee will be established and selection of an architect for the new GSB facility will be made.

The design stages for the facility will continue throughout this year and into 2001, and construction is scheduled to begin during the summer of 2001.