Warren Spector, the former co-president of Bear Stearns Cos., will help students pay tuition for a “unique and intense education” at St. John’s College -- to the tune of $25 million.
Spector and Ronald Fielding, a former top-performing municipal bond fund manager, each donated $25 million to their alma mater to support academics, financial aid and career services. St. John’s, a private liberal arts college with a combined student enrollment of less than 1,000, has campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland.
School officials had seen an increased demand for student aid since the 2008 financial crisis and want to make sure that St. John’s is “operating in the most efficient way,” Spector said Wednesday in an interview. Tuition is about $50,000 a year, excluding room, board and books, according to the school.
Spector, a 1981 graduate, is chairman of the school’s new capital campaign, while Fielding, a 1970 graduate, is chairman of college’s board.
“We both made a gift that would move the needle,” said Spector, adding that the capital campaign is in a quiet phase and its goal won’t be announced for about two years while it seeks donors. “We feel passionately about the school and want to make sure we can provide financial aid to make it affordable to all families.”
‘Great Thinkers’
The cash gifts are each the biggest in St. John’s history, and the majority will go to the $161 million endowment, the school said in a Nov. 5 statement.
Spector entered Princeton University in 1976 with the intention of majoring in mathematics. After a year, he decided to attend St. John’s in Annapolis, whose students study the works of the “great thinkers.” Spector also earned a master’s of business administration from the University of Chicago.
St. John’s taught him “to be thoughtful, open-minded and to listen carefully, which a lot of people might learn elsewhere, but it was taught very well at St. John’s,” he said.
Spector, who joined Bear Stearns in 1983 as a trading assistant, became co-president in 2001 and was seen by analysts as heir apparent to the man who had helped guide his career, Chief Executive Officer Jimmy Cayne. But Cayne ousted Spector in 2007 over the collapse of two hedge funds that lost $1.6 billion of investor capital.
Spector, 58, now is chairman of Balbec Capital, a private investment firm with offices in London, Atlanta and Scottsdale, Arizona. He’s also chairman of Tashtego Films, a New York-based film and television company run by his wife, Margaret Whitton.
Fielding, 67, who managed the Oppenheimer Rochester municipal bond funds, and their predecessors, the Rochester Funds, for more than 25 years, retired in 2009.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mary Romano in New York at mromano6@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Mary Romano at mromano6@bloomberg.net, Josh Friedman
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