Entrepreneur and visionary marketer David G. Booth has made history 300 million ways with a $300 million gift to the University of Chicago business school, which will be renamed University of Chicago Booth School of Business in his honor. This is the largest gift to any business school in the world, beating out by a country mile the $105 million given to Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in 2006 by Philip H. Knight, founder and chairman of Nike.
Booth, the founder and chief executive of Dimensional Fund Advisers, received an MBA from the school in 1971 and built his successful investment firm on finance principles he learned at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
The biggest donation to a business school in history has the blogosphere buzzing. Mark Nabong raises two important questions: 1) How bloody rich must you be to have $300 million lying around? 2) If you’re going to rename it, why not name it something truly awesome, like the Darth Vader School of Business, or The Institute of Don’t Worry About It, We’re Totally Gonna Hook You Up With Major Cash Later?
Meanwhile, after spending buckets of money on GSB paraphernalia, the sudden name change has GSBsutras wondering whether his Chicago GSB shirts will lose their inherent value with the heavy “Booth” branding in progress. How to resolve this dilemma? Like any Chicago GSB student worth his/her salt, GSBsutras pledges to parameterize the problem statement in order to build a model to calculate how long it will take for the “Booth” brand to build up.
“I then hone it down to the exact number of days and use that time to amortize the ridiculously expensive Chicago GSB gear that I bought from the bookstore,” he explains. “If you see me wearing the ‘GSB’ related gear almost every day to class, please don’t think I am falling behind on my laundry. Like any b-school student, I am only trying to get my money’s worth.”
Speaking of which, anyone want to place a bet on whether the University of Chicago Booth School of Business will use some of this mega endowment to create a lighter fee structure for its students?
Hmm… didn’t think so.
