Financier Ernest Rady Commits $100M to UC San Diego Business School

UC San Diego/Ernest Rady photo used with permission

Ernest Rady is the San Diego gift who just keeps on giving.

After donating $30 million to UC San Diego in 2004 to support the university’s newly established School of Management, with another $5 million for campus expansion, the billionaire philanthropist and his wife Evelyn have agreed to donate an additional $100 million to recruit and retain faculty at the business school that bears their name.

Last year Ernest and Evelyn Rady donated $120 million to Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, which is affiliated with UC San Diego, to sequence and analyze the genome of every pediatric patient admitted there. The commitment followed a $60 million gift in 2006 from the Rady family and American Assets, the private company Rady founded in 1967 that manages and controls a group of financial services, investment management, and real estate companies.

Rady moved to San Diego in 1966 with his family from Winnipeg, in Canada’s Manitoba Province, where his late parents are memorialized by the Rose and Max Rady Jewish Community Centre. He also serves as chairman and president of the San Diego-based Insurance Company of the West, and as chairman and CEO of Irvine, CA-based Westcorp (NYSE: [[ticker:WES]]), which operates one of the nation’s largest independent automobile finance companies, and Western Financial Bank, a Southern California community bank.

Much of Rady’s donation will be used to create endowed professorships and other financial packages to attract and keep top scholars, according to a statement from UC San Diego.

The Rady School of Management has 27 full-time faculty, according to an account by U-T San Diego reporter Gary Robbins. That number is expected to eventually rise to 65.

The school is competing for business faculty with such rivals as Stanford, Berkeley, and UCLA, and the demand for professors in finance and accounting is especially keen. According to Dean Robert S. Sullivan, the basic annual salary for a new assistant professor in finance is $200,000 to $210,000.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.