Billion-dollar drive powers Pitt's rise

At 25, she is a junior, her progress slowed by a bout with cancer and her mother's heart problem. Even though her widowed mother has recovered, Esper and her fiance, Eric Hall, have delayed marriage so that she can stay in school and help take care of her 15-year-old brother, Lance.

Esper is among hundreds of students and faculty who have benefited from Pitt's $1 billion fund drive. University officials plan to announce today the campaign has wrapped up eight months ahead of schedule - marking the first time a nonprofit in the region has raised $1 billion in donations.

"We're really now widely viewed as among the top 10 or 12 public institutions in the country, and that's a cluster of universities in which we think we belong, and we're glad to be in that company," Pitt Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg said.

Recently, the Times Higher Education Supplement, a London newspaper, ranked Pitt ninth best among public universities and 32nd among all universities in the United States.

Pitt lightened Esper's burden this year by giving her $2,800 from the Ralph and Bettye Bailey Scholarship, created through its fundraising campaign called Discover a World of Possibilities.

"That's a lot of money it freed up in our household, and we could breathe because there were just some things we weren't going to be able to do," said Esper, of Kennedy. "We weren't going to be able to buy Christmas presents."

Launched in 1997, the Discover a World of Possibilities campaign has endowed 332 scholarships, 29 fellowships, 16 professorships, 66 faculty chairs and 435 funds so that faculty and students may travel, do research or buy books. It's provided $48.4 million for new buildings and the renovation of campuses.

Pitt's fund drive has been extended to 2014 to raise another $1 billion. It is not alone in the billion-dollar frenzy. Published reports say that 25 other American universities are trying to raise at least $1 billion, topped by Stanford University's $4.3 billion goal.

The campaign allowed Pitt to woo faculty members Dr. Steven Shapiro from Harvard University and Angela Gronenborn, a structural biologist from the National Institutes of Health.

To the amazement of his colleagues, Shapiro left an endowed chair at Harvard for the Jack D. Myers Chair of the Department of Medicine at Pitt. The university not only gave him the $2.5 million chair, the proceeds of which pay for his salary, but also a laboratory, the promise of another 40,000 square feet of space and money to recruit more faculty.

"We've already skyrocketed to No. 7 in NIH funding (at $431.5 million)," Shapiro said. "We would like to continue to move up the list, but more importantly, we'd like to cure some important diseases and help patients."

Gronenborn headed the structural biology section at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Md., before she came to Pitt in December. Money from Pitt's campaign paid for her lab and the equipment to study the molecules of healthy and diseased cells -- especially those affected by Parkinson's disease.

"If I could find something for Parkinson's, I would be really happy," she said. "It's sad that we have no treatment by now."

Pitt raised the $1 billion from 116,146 donors. Of those, 198 gave at least $1 million, and 67,980 are alumni.

"The biggest difference is we're reaching out to alumni all over," said Albert J. Novak, Jr., vice chancellor for institutional advancement. "This is not a Southwestern Pennsylvania-focused campaign. It's global."

Two donors are Keith E. Schaefer, 57, of Newport Beach, Calif., and Eva Tansky Blum, 57, of Squirrel Hill.

Schaefer graduated from Pitt in 1971 with a degree in political science and economics. In gratitude for his "eye-opening" experience at the university, he became a Pitt trustee and gave $250,000 to endow a scholarship for undergraduates.

Schaefer is the president and CEO of BPL Global Ltd., a provider of broadband and Internet content through standard power lines. He said his conversations with the students teach him how young people use his company's products.

He visits Pitt about once a month and has met regularly with the recipients of his scholarships.

"I'm a better person and a smarter person because I've been in conversation over a period of years with these students and watched their development and growth," Schaefer said. "I learn from the questions they ask."

Blum, a Pitt trustee; her brother, Burton Tansky; and her sister, Shirley Gordon, gave a gift, which they would not specify, to create a student lounge at the William Pitt Union in honor of their mother and father. Their parents came from Russia and Poland to America about 1920. When the Depression swept the country, their dreams of pursuing a college diploma died, but they made sure their children got one.

"We wanted to do something in their memory to acknowledge how fortunate we were to have them be so dedicated to higher education," Blum said.

Pitt estimates that all the jobs that it sponsors generate $1.1 billion, according to its 2006 Economic Impact Report. Between 1995 and 2005, the number of university employees climbed from 9,671 to 11,990.

"It's a significant growth of employment and significant growth in economic impact on the region," said Bill Flanagan, executive vice president for corporate relations with the Allegheny Conference on Community Development.

Two of the keys to the campaign's success, Pitt fundraisers say, is that 45,000 donors are not Pitt alumni, and 55 percent of the money came from outside the region.

So far, $456 million has been raised for the health science schools. Clyde Jones, vice chancellor for health sciences development, is confident the university can raise money from people who never went to school there.

"People who are dealing with cancer in their family aren't too concerned about undergraduate affiliation," he said. "They just want to cure the disease."