Sandy Weill pumps $170M into Weill Cornell Medical College

Sandy Weill isn’t finished yet.

By the time he is done with the latest chapter of his life, which has been devoted to philanthropy, the ‘House that Sandy Built’ may become shorthand for Cornell Medical College, rather than now-teetering Citigroup, the financial supermarket Weill created in 1998 by merging his company, Travelers, with Citicorp.

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The New York Times reports that the 76-year-old billionaire has pledged $170 million to the Weill Cornell Medical College so that the university can proceed with plans to build a new medical research building by 2013.

The philanthropist, who serves as the chairman of the board, is widely credited with helping to turn the college into a world-class medical school since making his first donation in 1998. (The Cornell Daily Sun estimates that Weill, who graduated from Cornell in 1955, has given the university over $720 million, along with his wife, since 1998.)

Weill had arranged to give $250 million to the medical school upon his death. But Cornell’s president, David J. Skorton, apparently convinced him to produce the money now, even if the sum was smaller, when the university was navigating difficult times. The school’s $5.4 billion endowment has lost more than a third of its value since last June and donations are dramatically down.

“The statement we’re trying to make is that this is a really important time to give money, whatever it’s for,” Weill told the Times.

But as the paper also notes, Weill may be trying to burnish an uncertain legacy after the near-collapse of the company he had built into the largest financial institution in the world. The financial supermarket model that he championed has also been widely discredited.

Weill, who stepped down as Citigroup’s chairman nearly three years ago, said he has been disturbed by Citi’s declining fortunes (and his own, as a result), but was focusing his energies on philanthropy.

Besides their donations to Cornell, he and his wife, Joan, have also given large sums to Carnegie Hall, where he is chairman of the board, the Hebrew Home for the Aged and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Foundation. Slate Magazine named him the seventh largest charitable donor in America in 2007.

“Legacies are for other people to decide,” Weill told the Times. “But my activities in the not-for-profit center seem to have a lot more staying power than what I accomplished in the for-profit arena.”

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