Tufts, Lesley Receive Big Gift

Tufts University and Lesley University announced yesterday that they had received a combined gift of $272 million, the largest donation that either school has ever received.

The universities will evenly split the money from the trust of Frank Currier Doble, founder of the Boston-based Doble Engineering Company. Doble, who died nearly 40 years ago, majored in electrical engineering at Tufts and served as a trustee at Lesley for over two decades.

Calling the gift from Doble’s trust “phenomenal,” Lesley President Joseph B. Moore said that “there’s a big responsibility now to manage it well.”

Lesley plans to invest the funds in its endowment, which currently stands at $65 million, according to Moore. The university is currently undergoing an expansion of its facilities, but the increased endowment revenue will also go to student scholarships, faculty research, and academic program investment.

“I think it’s a potentially transformative gift for Lesley,” said Brian P. Murphy ’86-’87, the Vice Mayor of the Cambridge City Council. “It’s certainly not every day that you get an individual gift that exceeds your annual budget [of $110 million] and triples your endowment in one fell swoop.”

Murphy called the gift “an exciting opportunity for President Moore and the Lesley community,” and suggested that the money could be used to provide support for student and faculty, particularly for their students who frequently go into relatively low-paying public service professions. The school is best known for its education and teacher-preparation programs.

The gift is the 12th largest private donation to an institution of higher education in the past 40 years, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Harvard does not rank among the recipients for the 100 largest private donations.

Yesterday’s gift also represents a substantial boon for Tufts, which, like Lesley, will funnel the gift into its endowment and use the revenue for a number of programs, including financial aid. The university is also undergoing a capital campaign and plans to develop a new interdisciplinary research lab, which will be named for Doble, that would bring biologists and engineers together, according to Tufts spokeswoman Kim M. Thurler.

“This is the largest gift that we have received,” Thurler said, noting that Doble had “a close relationship with the university” as his company was based on the Tufts campus for 22 years. Doble, who graduated in 1911, received an honorary doctorate from Tufts in 1962.

The school, which has an endowment of $1.4 billion, has only received one other gift over $100 million.

Doble made his fortune by inventing a test used to check the safety and reliability of electrical utilities. When he died in 1969, Doble’s trust was valued at about $2 million. The trust was dissolved last fall when Doble Engineering Company sold for $319 million.

—Staff writer Athena Y. Jiang can be reached at ajiang@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Alexandra Perloff-Giles can be reached at aperloff@fas.harvard.edu.