It seems logical for people to donate less when their wallets are tight. Phillip Lyons, a high school economics teacher in Palo Alto, Calif., has been donating $100 to his alma master, UCLA, every year since graduation. However, things became different after the recession hit.

“I haven’t given since the [economic] downturn,” Lyons said. “But in all honesty, I think it’s psychological. I still have a job and the same income but I feel less well off so I haven’t given.”

Cornell will be one of the beneficiaries of the late hotelier Leona Helmsley’s multi-billion dollar estate, The New York Times reported Wednesday. Helmsley, was known as the “queen of mean” according MSNBC, and she was able to amass her estimated $5 billion estate because of her cutthroat business mentality.

Sanford Weill ’55, whose name adorns multiple buildings throughout Cornell’s Ithaca and New York City campuses, has once again pledged a nine digit sum to his alma mater, helping the University continue to grow even as it faces a stringent budget deficit.

Vice President for University Communications Tommy Bruce confirmed last night that Weill gave the Weill Cornell Medical College $170 million in December and January in order to allow the University to build a new medical research building.Weill Donations

It’s about time the world’s largest democracy got some attention around these parts.

Last month’s $50 million gift from a philanthropic fund largely controlled by mega-industrialist Ratan Tata ’62 will go a long way towards strengthening Cornell’s academic and human ties with India, and the half of the gift allocated to endow scholarships for Indians in need will do much to increase the economic diversity of the international student body. “Any person ... any study,” indeed.

It’s true that Cornell has been involved with India on issues like health and agriculture for more than 50 years. Last year, President David Skorton even visited. But of late, Old Uncle Ezra’s wandering eye has more often explored his infatuation with the world’s largest unfree state, China.

The Tisch family’s $35 million donation to enhance University faculty came at the right time for the Big Red.

Recruitment and retention of talented faculty has become an increasingly serious and immediate issue at Cornell. The school’s professors aren’t getting any younger, and the cost of hiring new faculty isn’t getting any lower.

Comforting perhaps is that this problem is nothing new. In March 2007, then-Provost Biddy Martin spent most of her first Academic State of the University address focusing on the impending retirement of University faculty and the need to up the ante in faculty recruitment. Martin projected then that fully one-third of the University’s faculty would retire by 2022, making current efforts to hire new and talented professors an absolute necessity.