The Paulson Gift to Hebrew University

By Nekud October 20, 2026 29 min read

On the evening of Saturday 17 October 2026, inside the hall where the Hebrew University of Jerusalem hosts its Board of Governors, a financier who made his name by forecasting the collapse of the American housing market took the stage to announce the largest single gift in the university’s history: 250 million dollars, unrestricted, to an institution that Albert Einstein helped to found and that opened its doors in 1925. President Tamir Sheafer introduced the donor. John Paulson, born on 14 December 1955 in Queens, New York, said the words that Israeli and Jewish philanthropic outlets have since paraphrased in slightly different forms: that the return on a dollar at Hebrew University is, by his calculation, about ten times higher than at the elite American institutions with which he is more familiar, and that he did not want to dictate where the money goes. The room, by every published account, rose to him.

The figure is large enough to require a paragraph of its own before any argument can begin. Hebrew University was founded in 1925 as a flagship of the Zionist project and a Jewish answer to a question about scientific literacy in a country that did not yet exist. A quarter of a billion dollars, in 2026, is one of the largest single gifts an individual has ever made to an Israeli university. The press accounts place it third on that list. Only the roughly 400 million dollar bequest from Dr Howard and Lottie Marcus to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and an anonymous 260 million dollar gift to Bar-Ilan University, rank higher. So the honest framing for the reader is this: the gift is enormous, but it is not unprecedented in the region. What may be unprecedented, in time, is what the institution does with it.

What makes the gift more than a number is what the money is intended to do. According to the materials circulated at the gala and the interviews Paulson gave in the days around it, the sum is committed, in roughly equal weight, to four priorities. The first is a new Faculty of Engineering, which for the first time in the university’s history would bring engineering together formally with computer science, with medicine and with the life sciences. The second is the expansion of the university’s medical and biomedical education and research, including the scaling of a new model of medical education the university has been piloting, and an explicit attempt to increase the number of physicians trained in Israel. The third is research into trauma and post-traumatic stress, framed in the announcement as a matter of national importance given the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023 and the war that has followed. The fourth is a new impact and community think tank intended to connect academic expertise with pressing public needs in Israel and abroad.

The gift was followed, as these announcements usually are, by the renaming. The Mount Scopus campus in Jerusalem, one of Hebrew University’s three principal campuses, will now be known as the Alina and John Paulson Campus, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem. Alina is Paulson’s wife. The Mount Scopus ridge carries an unusual density of memory: it overlooks the Old City, holds the residential colleges of the Hebrew University students, and contains the national cemetery and a succession of monuments to Israeli wars and the wars that preceded them. A new name on top of that history is not a small thing. The campus is named, in a country in which a name is rarely a neutral thing, and the choice of campus was almost certainly not accidental on the part of the institution or the donor.

The framings Paulson offered that night are worth keeping in mind, because the gift will be discussed in their terms for years. He framed part of the gift as solidarity: a small country facing enormous challenges defending itself, and if there was ever a time to step up and support the country and its institutions, this would be it. He described Israel as a vibrant, democratic, pluralistic and advanced economy, words chosen with some care. In interviews, including with the Israeli business outlet Calcalist, he made the case that academic returns are higher in Israel than at the elite American schools because the academic quality is comparable and the costs are much lower. He did not, in those interviews, dwell on the question of what a private gift of this scale means in a country in which the share of GDP devoted to higher education is itself a subject of political argument. That omission is part of the story too.

Two Shortages

The case for the gift, as Paulson and the university have made it, rests on two diagnoses. The first is that Hebrew University, despite being the senior research university of the country and despite running one of the more respected medical schools in the region, does not have a faculty of engineering at all. It runs a School of Computer Science and Engineering, into which Paulson had already given 27 million dollars in 2023, in a building called the Paulson Bar-El Building, and it had already accepted a 2026 gift for a new building on the Edmond J. Safra Campus, the John Paulson Building for Electrical Engineering. But the structural umbrella of an engineering faculty, with the institutional authority to award engineering degrees in their own name, does not exist. The second diagnosis is that Israel, in 2026, does not train enough physicians for the country it has become. Israeli life expectancy has lengthened. The population has grown. The proportion of the medical workforce trained inside the country remains stubbornly below the OECD average. The twin shortage is what the quarter-billion is meant to address.

Both shortages are old. The engineering shortage is a function of institutional history. The Technion in Haifa has held the dominant position on engineering degree-granting in Israel for a century. The country decided, with reasons that made sense at the time, that there was room for only one such monopoly. Hebrew University built its reputation on the basic sciences, on medicine and on humanities. The result is a country whose high-technology sector is one of the most productive in the world per capita and a country in which the senior research university has not, until this gift, been authorised to grant engineering degrees. The physician shortage is a function of politics, demographics and history. Israel trained a relatively small share of its own doctors, imported a relatively large share from the former Soviet Union, and allowed the diaspora of the 1990s to do the work that a domestic pipeline could have done. That pipeline closed. The demographic boom of the 2000s and 2010s made the gap more visible rather than less. A gift that addresses both shortages at once is in some sense a single gift: more physicians mean a larger obligation to train them somewhere, and somewhere is more dignified if it is a research university that already understands the science.

The scale of the gift can be read in another way, as a kind of insurance against a future in which Israel cannot keep training its own high-technology workforce from the diaspora and from the army. The country’s high-technology sector has grown faster than its conventional workforce planning for thirty years, and the gap has been filled by accident rather than by design. A 250 million dollar gift to a founding engineering faculty, delivered as capital rather than as operating support, is the kind of investment that has a chance of outlasting any single administration. Whether it does so depends on whether the founding dean can outlast the founding donor, and on whether the institution’s own discipline can match the discipline that the gift imposes on the building schedule.

What is unusual about the announcement is the explicit linkage. The Hebraic framing is of engineering-and-medicine, of computer-science-and-life-sciences, treated not as parallel initiatives but as the missing piece of an existing puzzle. The unspoken premise is that Israel has plenty of engineers, plenty of physicians, plenty of scientists, and that what the country has not had is an institution authorised to weld them together at degree level and at faculty level. Whether the gift will be permitted to do that welding is the central question of the next several years. Weldings, of all kinds, are easier to propose than to perform. And in academia, a new faculty is, in effect, an administrative revolution that has to win acceptance from the surrounding professoriate, the surrounding universities and the relevant bodies of professional engineers.

The context is its own kind of pressure. The gift followed, by days, a 30 million dollar donation to Hebrew University from Steven H. Lavin. Mega-gifts to Israeli institutions have become a trend in the years since 7 October 2023. The trend is partly a response to what the Israeli philanthropic sector calls solidarity needs and partly a response to what the Israeli government calls an unprecedented moment. The donor class that assembled in Jerusalem for the gala assembled in a country at war, in a country in which the question of who pays for Israeli science and medicine has been quietly reweighted by the war itself, and in a country in which the question of who pays for Israeli science and medicine has begun to mean something more pointed than it meant before the war. The Paulson gift sits at the intersection of those pressures, and it will be read through them whether or not the donor intended it to be.

Why Engineering, Why Now

Israel has, by general acknowledgment, an enormous high-technology sector built disproportionately on immigrants, on people trained elsewhere and on a private sector that does much of its own research and development. The country is regularly described, by people who find these descriptions enjoyable, as the startup nation. Less often remarked, but true, is that the universities have not been the source of most of that workforce. The Technion and the smaller engineering colleges have trained a great many. The Israeli defence forces, particularly Unit 8200 and the technical branches of the ground forces, have absorbed and trained a great many others. And a great many of the engineers and computer scientists in Israeli industry were educated in Russia, in Eastern Europe, in the United States, in physics or mathematics departments rather than in engineering departments, or in no credentialing institution at all and proved by other means that they could do the work. The high-technology sector is a triumph of the diaspora, of the army and of self-education; the universities, on the standard startup-nation story, come further down the list than the rhetoric suggests.

There is a parallel story in medicine. Israel’s pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors are among the more productive in the world per dollar of research spending, and the country has produced a small but persistent share of genuinely original medical research. That productivity has been anchored, historically, in the universities – the Weizmann Institute, the Technion, Hebrew University, Ben-Gurion – and in the hospital system, where senior physicians have been able to combine clinical work with research on a scale that other countries do not routinely permit. The biomedical sector is therefore structurally more dependent on the universities than the technology sector is, and a gift that strengthens the medical side of a research university is, in this sense, more obviously consequential than a gift that strengthens the engineering side. The two priorities in the gift are not equally leveraged. The medical priority is more leveraged because the country has fewer alternative sources of medical research training.

That observation is not an objection to the gift. It is, in fact, the gift’s strongest justification. If a country is going to depend, for its economic future, on a workforce that the senior university did not train and that the immigration system cannot reliably supply, then the senior university should build the capacity to train it. The argument is structural rather than romantic. It says that the high-technology sector is too important to the country to be sustained, indefinitely, on the demographic accident of a large Russian-speaking aliyah, and that it is too important to be sustained on the selective intake of the army’s technical programmes, which selects for a few thousand people and discards the rest of the cohort. A founding Faculty of Engineering is, in this view, a deferred correction of a structural gap.

A founding Faculty of Engineering is a different and slower proposition than a gift to an existing one. To put it bluntly, you cannot buy a faculty. You can hire its founding chair and several of its senior chairs. You can build the laboratories. You can apply for accreditation. You can recruit the first cohort of students and watch them graduate, on the optimistic schedule, six years later. And you can hope that the country, the parents of those students and the relevant bodies of professional engineers recognise the resulting degrees as equivalent to the ones granted by the institution whose monopoly is being challenged. None of this is impossible. All of it is slow. The slowest part is the social one: the recognition, by employers and by parents, that the new faculty is producing engineers who are as good as those from the institution whose monopoly it is breaking.

There is a question the gift does not directly answer. Was Hebrew University going to create an engineering faculty anyway? The university had been discussing, in public and in private, the question of how to expand its science and engineering capacity for at least a decade before Paulson’s gift. The 27 million dollars of 2023 and the earlier 2026 building are evidence of incremental movement along a path that was already in motion. What the 2026 gift is plausibly doing is collapsing a multi-year capital campaign into a single weekend and turning a faculty that might have been debated for another decade into one that has a budget and a name on a building. Whether that is the same as creating the faculty, or only accelerating one that was already going to exist, is a question only the next ten years can answer. The conservative reading is that quarter-billion-dollar gifts of this kind typically accelerate plans rather than invent them. The interesting reading is that the acceleration may be large enough to count, for all practical purposes, as invention.

The Israeli accreditation politics deserve a paragraph of their own. The Council for Higher Education in Israel has not, historically, been enthusiastic about the proliferation of engineering degree-granting institutions, and its caution is reasonable. Engineering programmes require large investments in laboratory equipment, in supervision and in clinical or industrial placement that smaller institutions struggle to make. The caution is also inconvenient for a country whose universities compete with each other for status in ways that are not entirely productive. A new engineering faculty at Hebrew University will be examined, by the council and by the country, against a benchmark set by the Technion; that benchmark is high, and meeting it slowly is part of the price of admission to the field. A gift that promises speed is, in this light, a gift that needs the institution’s own discipline to deliver slowly rather than loudly.

There is a second question, less often asked, about leverage. A founding dean, however well-funded, must recruit a critical mass of senior faculty who could plausibly have been, and probably have been, courted by the Technion, by the Weizmann Institute and by the major American and European schools. In a global market for engineering professors, in which Israeli salaries are constrained by the public-sector character of the universities, even a quarter of a billion dollars is not a salary line. It is a building line, an equipment line and a scholarships-and-doctoral-fellows line. Building a faculty is, in the end, a recruitment problem as much as a money problem, and recruitment is where the gift is most likely to prove its weight. If the founding dean is the right person, the gift becomes a leverage event. If the founding dean is the wrong person, the buildings sit.

A third question is accreditation. To grant engineering degrees, a new faculty needs the recognition of the relevant Israeli body, the Council for Higher Education, and eventually the international bodies that allow its graduates to practice abroad. Accreditation, in any country, is more political than technical. The institutions that grant accreditation tend to ask, beneath their technical language, whether the new faculty is in fact what it says it is. The first cohort of graduates, in 2030 or 2032, will be examined with a particular attention by every engineering firm in Israel. That examination is the moment that the gift’s engineering priority will succeed or fail. Nothing in the announcement, properly read, attempts to compress that schedule, and the donor’s posture of leaving the priorities in the institution’s hands is, in the context of accreditation, the right posture. It is also the posture most likely to be tested.

Physicians and the Slow Science of Recovery

The second half of the gift is medical. The medical school at Hebrew University is one of four in the country; the others are at the Technion, at Tel Aviv University and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Israel is widely reported, in line with most international comparisons, to train fewer physicians per capita than the OECD average, and to compensate, in part, by importing physicians from former Soviet states whose training and language were assumed to transfer relatively easily. That pipeline is now closed. The dependency on it has become uncomfortable. A country that cannot reliably train its own doctors is a country with a structural weakness that no defence budget can address.

Increasing domestic medical school capacity is, however, a generational project. You need new buildings. You need clinical training sites. You need a larger cohort of clinical supervisors, who are themselves the bottleneck of any medical-education system. And you need years of accreditation and licensing. A gift that addresses only the budget of the medical school addresses a fraction of the problem. A gift that addresses the budget, the building and the supervision comes closer to addressing the whole. The press accounts describe the medical portion of the gift as covering all three, and that is the right scale of intervention if the goal is to increase the absolute number of physicians trained in Israel by something other than a small proportion.

The medical school at Hebrew University has been piloting a new model of medical education, of which the gift is intended to support the scaling. The press reports describe this as a more integrated, longer-form, more problem-based curriculum. The intent is the same as in many other countries, where the medical curriculum is being slowly reconstructed around case-based learning, around longitudinal relationships with patients and around early and repeated exposure to the clinical environment. That is a real change but a slow one. A gift that recognises the change and the speed of the change is doing something useful, but a gift that hopes to buy a doubling of medical graduates in five years is hoping for too much. The honest scale of the medical-school gain is probably measured in additional classes per cohort over the next decade rather than in a doubling of headcount over the next five years.

The medical curriculum reforms the gift is intended to scale are themselves a response to a global trend that the Israeli medical schools have been slower than some of their peers to adopt. Case-based learning, longitudinal clerkships and early clinical exposure have been the dominant reforms in North American medical schools for over a decade, and Israeli schools have been more cautious. The gift’s commitment to scale the Hebrew University pilot is a vote of confidence in the school’s own judgment about how to train physicians.

The third piece of the gift is the most delicate. Trauma and post-traumatic stress research, framed in the announcement explicitly as a response to the events of 7 October 2023 and to the war that has followed, is an urgent national priority and a young field. Israel has had, since the 1990s, a national programme of its own for post-traumatic stress in the military population, anchored at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center and within the Hebrew University’s own faculty of medicine. The war has shifted the centre of gravity of the trauma burden from a defined military population, which can be studied and followed within a single institutional framework, to a much larger civilian population, which cannot. Studies of civilians under rocket attack, of displaced families from the south and the north, of children whose schooling has been interrupted for two years, and of parents whose children were killed or taken hostage on 7 October itself, will take years to design and years to field and years to interpret.

There are two ways to be wrong here. The first is to crowd out the rest of the science with a fashionable topic, in the way that fields can be distorted by a wave of well-funded attention that draws good students and good grants but produces uneven findings because the methodology is not yet settled. Post-traumatic stress research in civilian populations is full of measurement problems, of selection biases, of cohort effects and of placebo responses that are themselves poorly understood. Funding that arrives before the methodology is solid can produce papers that do not replicate. The second way to be wrong is to under-fund the topic precisely because it is urgent, and to leave this generation’s trauma burden under-researched because the funding arrives too late and too narrowly. The risk of under-funding is, in the Israeli context of 2026, the larger of the two. The defensible posture is in between: a substantial investment in the field that does not displace the existing medical and biomedical research, and that resists the temptation to declare findings in real time because the world is watching. Hebrew University, like other institutions that have launched such programmes in the years since the war began, will need to make these tradeoffs deliberately and visibly.

A further difficulty is the distinction between military and civilian trauma, which the war has made harder to maintain. The research tradition at Hebrew University, partly anchored in the work of physicians who treated combat veterans for thirty years, was built on cohorts that could be defined and followed. Civilian trauma, after 7 October, came in waves that are difficult to define. There are the survivors of the Nova festival and the surrounding communities. There are the displaced families from the northern border, whose towns were evacuated twice. There are the children who spent two years in hotel rooms instead of classrooms. There are the hostages who returned, and the families of those who did not. There are the reservists, who straddle the military-civilian line that the war has blurred. Each of these cohorts needs its own research design, and no single gift, however large, can substitute for the slow work of designing each one.

The children are likely to be the cohort whose trauma is least understood for years to come. The Israeli research tradition has had little to say, historically, about civilian child trauma in conditions of sustained rocket attack and school closure. International research on child trauma in conflict zones exists, but it is rarely drawn from Israeli Jewish children or built on longitudinal cohorts. A research programme that follows the children of the south and the north into adolescence will produce findings that no other country can produce, and the findings will be politically delicate because the children of 7 October are being studied by their own society in real time.

The Fortune and Its Question

It is impossible to write about the money without writing about the money. John Paulson’s fortune was built in two surges. The first was the bet on the collapse of the American housing market in 2007 and 2008, executed through credit default swaps on subprime mortgage debt, which produced for Paulson personally an estimated 3.7 to 4 billion dollars in 2007 alone, widely described at the time as the largest one-year payday in Wall Street history. The second was the bet on gold through the Peak Gold Fund, structured as an exchange-traded product that was one of the largest holders of physically backed gold ETFs, which produced another estimated 4.9 billion dollars in 2010 as the price of bullion rose. The combined effect was a fortune that, for a few years, ranked Paulson among the very richest people in the world. Forbes estimated his net worth in August 2025 at about 3.8 billion dollars, a useful reminder that the famous fortune has compressed enormously. The story of the money is not the story of uninterrupted accumulation.

He founded Paulson and Co. in 1994, with about 2 million dollars of his own capital and one employee, in space rented from Bear Stearns on the 26th floor of 277 Park Avenue. The firm was an event-driven specialist: merger arbitrage, bankruptcy investing, distressed credit. It became one of the flagship names of a generation of hedge funds whose reputation was made on bets that other institutions preferred not to make. The post-2010 compression of the fortune is partly a function of the subprime trade not repeating, partly a function of returns from other funds in the same era outperforming his, and partly a function of the steady outflows from a model that depends on convincing outside investors to keep their money in a fund that no longer produces record-setting years. A 2026 gift of 250 million dollars is, in that context, a meaningful fraction of a fortune that has shrunk substantially from its peak rather than a rounding error on one that has continued to grow. The arithmetic of giving is part of the story.

The ethical question is the one that attaches to the first half of the fortune and has never quite gone away. In 2007, Paulson and Goldman Sachs built the Abacus 2007-AC1 vehicle, a collateralised debt obligation in which Paulson’s fund was permitted to select the mortgages it was betting against; those mortgages were then assembled into securities and sold to Goldman’s clients without the disclosure of Paulson’s role. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman Sachs, which settled in 2010 for 550 million dollars, then the largest SEC settlement with a Wall Street firm. Paulson was never indicted; his firm maintained, and continues to maintain, that the structure was disclosed to investors. The defensible position is also the uncomfortable one. The money is real. The gift is real. A reader is entitled to hold both facts and an opinion about the source at the same time. The essay does not adopt either the prosecutorial posture or the exonerating posture, because the public record does not support either one.

The gift invites the question because it is unrestricted. Paulson was explicit, in interviews including the one with Calcalist, that he did not want to dictate where the funds go. That posture is the opposite of the conditional gift, in which the donor specifies the building, the wing, the lecture series, the named chair and the deadline. It is the opposite also of the venture-philanthropy model, in which the donor specifies the deliverables, the metrics and the milestones, and reduces the institution, in the most aggressive version, to a delivery mechanism. An unrestricted gift is, in the philanthropic lexicon, the most respectful kind of gift to the recipient institution and the most trusting kind. It is also the kind that asks the most of the donor’s moral standing, because the donor has chosen to take the institution’s word for what it needs. The donor’s posture toward the gift is a kind of trust instrument in its own right, and the trust is one the gift invites the public to honour or withhold.

The Israeli context is its own complication. The gift followed, by days, a 30 million dollar donation to Hebrew University from Steven H. Lavin. Mega-gifts to Israeli institutions have become a trend in the years since 7 October 2023. Paulson’s framing of the gift, in the Calcalist interview and elsewhere, leaned on solidarity: a small country facing enormous challenges defending itself, and if there was ever a time to step up and support the country and its institutions, this would be it. He described Israel as a vibrant, democratic, pluralistic and advanced economy, words chosen with some care. The Israel he described is the Israel the donors are choosing to stand with, and is not unrelated to the Israel that other donors, and other governments, have chosen to stand against. The two Israeles coexist; the gift addresses one of them.

It is also worth noting that the Paulson Family Foundation, established in 2009 and reported in the press at about 1.4 billion dollars, has been one of the more visibly Jewish philanthropic operations of the last fifteen years. Major support has gone to the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv and to other heritage and museum institutions. The 2026 gift to Hebrew University is, in this sense, the continuation of a long-standing pattern rather than a sudden redirection. But it is the largest single gift the foundation has made to any single recipient, and that fact is part of what makes it a story.

The war has changed the way donors of all sizes think about Israeli institutions, and the 2023 to 2026 period has seen an unusual volume of major gifts to Israeli universities, medical centres and humanitarian organisations. The pattern reflects, in part, a sense that the war created a moral occasion for giving that the pre-war period did not, and, in part, a sense that the country’s institutions were underfunded relative to the role they would be expected to play in the post-war reconstruction. Paulson’s gift can be placed inside either reading without contradiction.

What a Donor Gets: Buildings That Stay

The most concrete thing a donor gets is a name on a building. The Alina and John Paulson Campus, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, is now the formal name of one of Hebrew University’s principal campuses. The 2023 gift already carries his name on the Paulson Bar-El Building at the Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering. The 2026 gift already carries his name on the John Paulson Building for Electrical Engineering on the Edmond J. Safra Campus. Adding the previous giving of about 46 million dollars to Hebrew University, his total support reaches about 296 million dollars. That sum is large enough that his name will be visible on the Mount Scopus campus for as long as the buildings stand. This is not the same as being famous, but it is more durable than being famous.

There is a comparison to be made with the other half of his philanthropy, which has included substantial support for the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, a Jewish heritage and museum institution rather than a research one. A research university and a museum are very different institutions, with very different timescales and very different obligations to the public. The Museum of the Jewish People asks of its visitors that they recognise themselves or their grandparents in the objects on display; a research university asks of its students that they think in ways they were not yet able to think before they arrived. To fund both, in roughly equal measure, is to take seriously the proposition that a people needs both kinds of institution, the one that preserves the memory and the one that takes the next step beyond it. It is also, implicitly, to refuse to choose between them, and to suggest that the choice is unnecessary.

The decision to put the gift’s name on the campus rather than on a single building is itself unusual. Most named gifts in Israel and elsewhere bear the name of a single school, centre or building. A named campus is a more ambitious choice: it implies that the institution identified with the campus is, in some sense, identified with the donor. Hebrew University has chosen the more ambitious route, and the choice has a history. The Mount Scopus campus was the site of the university’s earliest post-war reconstruction, and its renaming carries a different weight than the renaming of a building constructed in the 1990s would carry. The original donors of the Mount Scopus buildings chose not to put their names on them, or at least not in the prominent way that American universities have come to expect. Paulson is being asked to do what earlier donors declined to do.

The other thing a donor gets is harder to name. It is influence, of a particularly quiet kind. The donor of an unrestricted gift to a research university is buying the right to be heard when the university makes its major decisions. The donor does not get to make those decisions and is not, in any formal sense, in the room where they are made. The donor does get to be the kind of person the president calls when there is a question about the school’s direction, and the gift is the reason why. Influence of this kind is the most durable and least legible form of philanthropy; it does not appear in annual reports and cannot be photographed, and yet it is the part of the gift the donor is most likely to be aware of in the years after the cheque has cleared. A campus named after a donor is also, in a quiet and durable way, a seat at the table.

The think tank is the most interesting of the four funding priorities because it is the one that most resembles influence made into an institution. An impact and community think tank, in the framing of the announcement, is intended to connect academic expertise with pressing public needs in Israel and abroad. That is the standard description of an applied policy institute, and the question any applied policy institute eventually has to answer is whether it is policy advice or political advocacy. The risks on each side are familiar. The donor’s interest is in having the institute behave like a serious institution in either case; the public’s interest is in knowing which it is. A think tank that is partisan in everything but name is a think tank that has stopped being useful. A think tank that is too academic for the public purpose is a think tank that has stopped being relevant. The space between the two is the space in which most good applied policy work actually happens, and it is a space that is hard to defend against both the donor’s impatience and the public’s scepticism.

The five priorities, taken together, describe an institution that intends to add engineering to its portfolio, expand its medical school, anchor a serious trauma research programme, and host a public-facing policy institute. Whether the gift produces an engineering faculty that the country recognises, a medical school class twice the size of the present one, a trauma research programme that outlasts the war, a think tank that the government takes seriously, and a campus whose new name is treated as a tribute rather than an embarrassment, is a question for a future generation. The essay cannot answer it. The essay can note that the gift, whatever else it is, is the kind of gift whose answer takes longer than the donor’s lifetime and longer, perhaps, than the donor’s foundation’s planning horizon. A campus outlasts a foundation. A building outlasts a fortune. The honoree of the building will be remembered by the building, and the donors of the building will be remembered by the people who work in it.

What is most striking, after the catalogue of what the gift is and is not for, is the durability question. A campus is named, in this case, the Alina and John Paulson Campus. A donor’s fortune compresses from a peak of tens of billions to a Forbes estimate of about 3.8 billion. A decade passes, and another decade, and the donor’s name on the building is what remains. The more interesting question, to which the building is the answer, is whether naming a campus is the highest form of gratitude a philanthropist can offer, or whether buildings are the most durable and least sentimental thing anyone can leave behind. The two are not the same question. The first asks whether the donor chose the right form. The second asks whether there is a higher form. Buildings are what they are: large, immobile, indifferent to opinion. They are also the form in which private money best becomes public infrastructure, in the sense that the public can use them and the public can change them but cannot quietly erase them. The Hebrew University will need to decide, over the years to come, whether the new campus name is treated as a permanent gift of land and ideas or as a temporary inscription on a structure that may be renamed in due course. There is no hurry. Buildings are patient.