W.P. Carey hopes $50M gift benefits Hopkins and Baltimore

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), May 2, 2008 by Robbie Whelan

If you ask William Polk Carey, the 77-year-old real estate investor with a Baltimore pedigree that stretches back nearly 300 years, why he gave Johns Hopkins University $50 million to start a stand-alone business school, he'll talk about restoring Baltimore to its Revolutionary War-era economic glories.

"Our goal ... is to help do our share to continue the economic revitalization of Baltimore, and return it to the leadership position it had in 1797," he said recently at a public ceremony with Mayor Sheila Dixon.

And Carey takes his task seriously -- just as seriously as he takes his family's legacy of local philanthropy, business and public service. His great-great-great-grandfather, for whom the Carey Business School is named, was James Carey of Loudon, a prominent tobacco merchant and member of the first Baltimore City Council.

W.P. Carey's grandmother, Anne Galbraith Carey, founded the elite Gilman School in Roland Park, which Carey attended for one year before moving to Connecticut's Pomfret School, Princeton and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The main high school classroom building on Gilman's campus is known as Carey Hall.

During a recent interview in his rooms at New York's Waldorf- Astoria hotel, Carey said that he had been pushing Hopkins to start a business school since the 1960s.

"Shortly after I got out of Wharton, one of my mother's boyfriends was a fellow called Milton Eisenhower," he said, referring to the eighth president of Johns Hopkins University and younger brother of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. "I said to him, 'It will be very good for Baltimore and Maryland to have a business school at Johns Hopkins.'"

But Eisenhower dismissed the idea as narrow-minded and unnecessary, Carey said, and it wasn't until the mid-1990s, after Carey had established W.P. Carey & Co., a real estate investment firm with $10 billion in assets that is the largest limited liability company traded on the New York Stock Exchange, that he finally brought it up again.

"[JHU President] Bill Brody gave me an opening in his [1996] inaugural address, when he discussed an 'education alley' between Baltimore and D.C.," Carey said.

Brody, who will step down as university president this fall, declined to comment for this story.

It is not clear when Carey initially offered a gift of a specific dollar amount to the university -- he says it has been at least six or seven years -- but at the outset, officials at Johns Hopkins were not interested.

Over the last decade, Carey has paid for two feasibility studies on the possibility of a free-standing business school at Johns Hopkins, and they indicated a price tag of between $100 million and $200 million, according to Steven Knapp, former provost of Johns Hopkins and now the president of George Washington University.

"It looked like it was going to be very expensive, and it didn't look like it was going to differentiate us from other schools," Knapp said.

Instead, he said, the university chose to take a different path - - establishing a business program as part of the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education that would "build on existing strengths" at the university, including Hopkins' status as a leading medical research institution.

"The biotech industry is one of the reasons why at this historical moment they are starting a business school," Knapp said. "That is one reason Hopkins is getting interested in this, to teach medical professionals to operate in the world of business."

But Carey has a different theory about why Hopkins rejected his original overtures.

"I didn't see it as a slight," he said. "I saw it as a sort of natural academic opposition to business education. It's [people saying] 'We don't want to be a trade school.'"

In 2003, Carey took his $50 million to Arizona, where his family owned land, and by 2004, Arizona State University's newly renamed and endowed W.P. Carey School of Business was ranked 22nd nationally, according to U.S. News & World Report.

"I think what really got Hopkins interested was that they saw that I gave this money to ASU, and it became higher ranked than any business school in Maryland," Carey said.

In the same year, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine lost its No. 2 ranking to Washington University in St. Louis. At the same time, Carey says, Arizona State's MBA program was ranked higher than the program at Washington University's Olin School of Business.

"They thought, ASU doesn't have the same high stature as Johns Hopkins," he said. "Well, they were wrong."

In revolutionary days, Carey said, Baltimore was on a more equal footing with cities like Boston and Philadelphia, and it was business education that kept business flourishing in those cities.

"Boston had MIT and Harvard, so business stayed," he said.

A 1997 study by BankBoston determined that the 1,065 companies related to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and headquartered in the state were responsible for 125,000 jobs and generated worldwide sales of $53 billion.