Stein chair gift pushes campaign past $400 million

A $2 million grant from the LaSalle Adams Fund has pushed the University's Campaign for the Next Century over the $400 million mark.

The grant will endow the Sydney Stein Jr. Professorship of Public Management in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies. It will also establish a fund to support public-management research by the Stein Professor.

"We are delighted to receive this most generous grant from the LaSalle Adams Fund," said President Sonnenschein. "It will support research and teaching in public management that will benefit the entire nation. It honors an alumnus, Trustee and devoted friend of the University. And it has carried us past a truly important milestone in the Campaign for the Next Century."

The $405.5 million total raised so far represents 81 percent of the campaign's five-year goal of $500 million, with two years to go.

"This campaign is succeeding because the volunteers are working very hard and a great many friends of the University have made some very generous gifts," said campaign chairman B. Kenneth West. "The University depends on people who understand that great teaching and research have truly changed the world -- and many of the University's friends have had the vision to see that."

In all, 74,449 donors have made gifts to the campaign since its inception, with 1,235 making gifts of $25,000 or more. Sixty-one percent of the gifts have come from individuals, 23 percent from foundations, 9 percent from corporations and 7 percent from associations.

The new professorship endowed by the LaSalle Adams Fund honors Sydney Stein Jr., a Life Trustee of the University who was deeply concerned about questions of public policy. Stein was particularly interested in public administration and ways to make it more effective. He shared his wealth and his time generously with the Harris School and its predecessor, the Committee on Public Policy Studies.

"This professorship addresses the very concerns Jim Stein cared about most," said Robert Michael, Dean of the Harris School. "In the many discussions we had over the years, he emphasized the critical national need for the kind of public-management training that this professorship enables the Harris School to develop. We are very proud to have an endowed professorship that bears his name."

Stein made the first gift in support of public policy studies at the University in 1973 and was the first chairman of the Visiting Committee on Public Policy Studies. His vigorous support of the programs of the committee, and later the Harris School, continued throughout his lifetime. He died in 1991.

"Jim Stein exerted key leadership at a critical time in the University's deliberations about public policy studies. Without that leadership in the 1970s, the Committee on Public Policy Studies would not have gotten under way, and now this wonderful gift in his memory will help the Harris School strengthen its program in public management," Michael said.

Stein received his Ph.B. from the University in 1923 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He pursued a successful career as an investment counselor in Chicago, first with A.G. Becker and then with his own firm, Sydney Stein Jr. & Associates, which later became Stein, Roe & Farnham. Stein also served the U.S. government in a variety of advisory positions from 1941 through 1967. During World War II, he worked under President Roosevelt on a dollar-a-year basis at the Bureau of the Budget, where he helped establish 10 civilian war agencies and secured their full cooperation with the military. He later was a consultant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Stein was an active, committed alumnus and a member of the University's Board of Trustees from 1966 until his death in 1991. He received the Alumni Association's Public Service award in 1954.

The trustees of the LaSalle Adams Fund are Stein's daughters: Susan Stein Elmendorf, NancyStein Seasholes and Edith Carol Stein; Life Trustee Ferdinand Kramer (Ph.B.'22), retired chairman of Draper and Kramer real estate firm; and Rex Bates (S.B.'47, M.B.A.'49), retired vice chairman of State Farm insurance company.