Education: I Will Keep My Promise

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How far is it from a scruffy Harlem elementary school to the top of the heap? Not all that far, in the benign perception of Entrepreneur Eugene Lang, 66, if you can stick with your books and show a little hustle. Before he was nine years old, Lang was doing plenty of both. Each school day he walked the two miles back and forth between his home in Manhattan and P.S. 121 in Harlem to save the nickel carfare. Along the way, he picked up extra nickels from other boys by selling checkers that he had carefully lead weighted to become lethal shooters in a then popular game called street checkers.

Lang has long since moved on from checkers to American technology, which he hustles lucratively in some 45 foreign countries. But he retains his devotion to education, no longer as a recipient but as a formidable giver. "It's what I do for fun," he chuckles. Three weeks ago, the philanthropist clearly was having fun at a ceremony at New York City's eclectic New School for Social Research. The school's tiny (195 students) Seminar College, which offers a program of reading in the classics steered by seminars, was being renamed Eugene Lang College. And why not? Lang had made a gift to the institution of a cool $5 million because he had spotted something that he liked. "I see a college whose focus is clearly directed to individual student development," said Lang as he bathed in the cheerful homage of some 500 educators and well-wishers, while a brass quintet serenaded them with strains of Bach and Gabrieli.

There are bigger spenders in educational philanthropy. California Industrialist Arnold Beckman, for example, recently gave $20 million to the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering for a new West Coast study center, raising his total gifts for 1985 to $72.5 million. But what makes Lang special is his passion for the personal growth of students. Five years ago, he handed over $6 million to his alma mater, Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia. It was the largest single gift ever received by that quintessential liberal arts college, where the 1,300 or so students are deeply imbued with the school's Quaker tradition of individual responsibility. Lang had already given $1 million to Swarthmore, principally for a music building. "Nothing brings people together like music," he says.

His most unusual gift, if not his largest, was a guarantee of college tuition for 61 pupils at P.S. 121. Lang was making a sentimental visit to his old school, and in the middle of what he recalls as a paralyzingly dull, rehearsed speech to the graduating sixth grade, the inspiration came to him. Suddenly he broke off and told the astounded youngsters that he would give them each $2,000 toward college tuition, with more where that came from, if they stuck with their books and finished school. Later he followed with a letter to every pupil, declaring "I will keep my promise."