At a press conference held on April 25, 2011, Governor Martin O’Malley announced that the University of Maryland’s Law School had received a $30 million gift, the largest in the school’s history, from the W.P Carey Foundation. As a result of the gift, the law school will officially be changing its name to the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in honor of the founder of the foundation, W.P Carey’s grandfather and an alumnus of the school who graduated in 1880. In 2006, the foundation donated $50 million to Johns Hopkins in order to create the Carey School of Business, and after the announcement W.P. Carey expressed his desire to create a relationship between the two schools.
“The law school is now in the first tier. I’m looking forward to a joint J.D.-M.B.A. program, where it will be one big, great, happy family, giving people the best education imaginable in Baltimore,” Carey said in an interview with The New York Times.
In the same interview Pheobe Haddon, dean of the University of Maryland School of Law, expressed a desire to cultivate a relationship between the two schools.
“We’ve spent much of the last six months talking about his vision and our vision for developing our law and business program,” she said. “We’re very interested in developing a program with the Carey School at Hopkins.”
The Carey Foundation was founded in 1988 by W.P. Carey who by that time had achieved significant success as founder and CEO of W.P. Carey & Co. LLC, a corporate real estate financing firm, which owns more than 700 commercial properties all over the world. Carey’s purpose in starting the foundation was to support schools, universities, lecture circuits and other educational initiatives with, according to the foundation’s website, “the larger goal of improving America’s competitiveness in the world.”
Since then, the foundation has donated millions to schools all over the country including $50 million to the University of Arizona to establish the W.P. Carey School of Business and $10 million to Baltimore’s Gilman School in order to renovate one of their buildings, Carey Hall, which was named after W.P. Carey’s mother when she initially founded the institution in the early 20th century. W.P. Carey is also a Trustee Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, where the W. P. Carey Program in Entrepreneurship and Management, a popular undergraduate minor, is named after him.
