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1979–2003
The ladder: The university's own announcement of the Mendoza gift preserved the ladder as it stood in March 2000, and this section prints it as the baseline of everything above. In 1979 the Kellogg Foundation gave 10 million dollars. In 1989 Edward J. DeBartolo, the Youngstown shopping-mall developer, gave 33 million dollars — a single benefaction that underwrote DeBartolo Hall, the DeBartolo quadrangle and the Marie P. DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. In 1995 Franklin Eck gave 10 million; in 1997 an anonymous donor gave 10 million; in 1999 the estate of the oilman William J. Carey gave 15 million. Then, on 22 March 2000, Thomas F. Mendoza, a 1973 alumnus and Silicon Valley executive, and his wife Kathy gave 35 million dollars — the largest single gift in the university's history to that day — and the College of Business Administration took their name as the Mendoza College of Business. Each of these figures was, in its moment, near or at the top of the ladder; the table ranks them by size, and this entry keeps their order in time, because the succession of records is itself the history.
A South Bend name on the ladder: On 19 March 2003 the university announced a gift of 3 million dollars from Judd Leighton — the South Bend banker and civic leader whose fortune's full record stands below — to establish an endowed directorship for the performing arts, in the new DeBartolo performing arts center DeBartolo's gift had built. It is the largest documented gift to the university by a South Bend resident of that era, and it is characteristic of Leighton's giving: an endowment for a working position rather than a name on a wall.
Sources:
- University of Notre Dame news releases (22 March 2000; 19 March 2003) — the Mendoza gift and the university's own list of its previous top donations; the Leighton directorship gift.
- Notre Dame Magazine — the DeBartolo benefaction of 33 million dollars and the three works it underwrote.