Entrepreneur to Give USC $35 Million

A soft-spoken El Monte entrepreneur who “started with nothing and was lucky” is donating $35 million to the USC School of Business, the largest cash gift ever made to a business school.

In recognition of the gift, which is to be officially announced today, USC is renaming the business school after Gordon S. Marshall, 77, who graduated from the university after serving as a bomber pilot in World War II then made his fortune as one of the nation’s leading distributors of electronic components.

USC plans to add the gift to its growing endowment. But some of the earnings will be used for a new program to send all first-year MBA students overseas for four weeks to introduce them to international business.

The self-effacing Marshall set only one condition on his gift: No black-tie dinners in his honor.

“I’m overwhelmed with all of this attention,” Marshall said of the fuss over his generosity. “I was just hoping I could give a little money to the school and go back and do my thing. . . . I guess it’s not going to work that way.”

University officials, meanwhile, lined up to praise Marshall, who is making the second-largest donation ever to USC, surpassed only by publishing magnate Walter H. Annenberg’s $120 million in 1993 for communications programs.

“I think that any time USC or UCLA can move its programs ahead with a big gift, then that’s good for the whole region,” said USC President Steven B. Sample, calling the donation a big boost in the university’s plan to amass a $1-billion endowment by 2000.

The contribution will help the business school keep pace with changing technology, recruit top faculty and kick-start new programs such as the one dispatching the entire first-year MBA class to study abroad, said business school Dean Randolph W. Westerfield.

This spring, all 258 students will travel to Mexico City, Shanghai and Tokyo to complete a three-unit course in Pacific Rim management practices and business opportunities.

“As far as we know, no business school has tried to do this,” Westerfield said. “Every dean and business teacher knows the importance of the global marketplace and international business.”

The gift comes at a time when the demand for business education is growing--along with the competition for students.

What will now be called the Gordon S. Marshall School of Business recently broke ground on a $24-million building. Applications to USC for the master’s degree program in business administration rose from 1,220 in 1995 to 1,499 last year.

UCLA, meanwhile, recently added a seven-building complex to its John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management, named after the Los Angeles entrepreneur who donated $15 million to the campus. And UC Berkeley has built a mini-campus for its Haas Business School, named after the Haas family of Levi Strauss & Co., which donated $23.8 million.

For the 77-year-old USC School of Business, the oldest in Southern California, “this money is very important,” said Westerfield. “We see this as a way of further leveraging the growth and success we have already had. We want to develop a sense of newness, new identity and new approaches.”

One of the school’s main thrusts has been training students to become entrepreneurs, he said, making Marshall an appropriate donor.

He launched Marshall Industries of El Monte in the early 1950s, half a dozen years after graduating from what was then USC’s College of Commerce. He said his interest in electronics sprang from his teenage years as ham radio operator in Pasadena.

“I was down to my last few thousand dollars I had saved from the Air Corps,” he said. “I started with nothing and was lucky and worked hard and was at the right place at the right time.”

Today, Marshall Industries is one of the nation’s five largest distributors of electronic components, with sales of $1.2 billion to IBM and thousands of other manufacturers.

Marshall has kept close a association with USC over the years, serving on its board of trustees since 1968 and occasionally delivering guest lectures.

Sample and others had approached him before for a large gift, he said, and one morning he awakened and decided to do it.

“When you get to my age, and you are slowing down and on the downside of the curve, you look around and say, ‘What can I do that is worthwhile?’ ” he said.

“Having been associated with the university for all of these years . . . I said: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to maybe give some money to the school.’ I’m happy, proud pleased, grateful that I can do it. This is the only real endowment interest that I have.”

Ever the practical businessman, Marshall made his pledge days before the new year, getting a whopper of a 1996 tax deduction. Payments will be spaced out over three years.

His gift instantly made him one of the top 10 philanthropists in the nation for 1996, according to Slate magazine, Microsoft’s venture into online publishing.

But his $35 million still left him well behind Utah grocery magnate L. S. Skaggs, who with his wife gave $100 million to San Diego’s Scripps Research Institute. Southern California’s publicity-shy Gonda family was sixth on the list of 1996 donors, having given $45 million to create a neuroscience and genetic research center at UCLA.

The largest previous gift to a business school was one of $33.5 million to Vanderbilt University.