Leadership of Cornell’s Medical College to Stay in Sanford Weill’s Family

Press Release
December 15, 2014
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By his own admission, Sanford I. Weill could have handled his last major effort at succession planning better. After all, his handpicked successor at Citigroup presided over multibillion-dollar losses that led to a $45 billion taxpayer-financed bailout.

But Mr. Weill says he feels much more confident about who will take over his role in one of his biggest charitable endeavors, Weill Cornell Medical College.

He will announce on Tuesday that his daughter, Jessica Bibliowicz, will succeed him as chairman of the medical school’s board of overseers.

“My record of picking successors has not been great,” he joked in a recent interview. But he later added of his daughter, “She exudes leadership.”

Ms. Bibliowicz added, “I’ve always said my No. 1 passion is the medical school.”

Effective Jan. 1, the transition will signal the end of Mr. Weill’s two-decade leadership of Weill Cornell’s board, during which he raised billions of dollars — much of which came from his personal fortune — to fashion the school into a global institution for health research and teaching.

The onetime banking executive began his association with the medical school when, seeking to find a way to juggle both his business career and his support of his alma mater in central New York, he decided to help a Cornell outpost close to home.

What followed has become a tremendous outpouring of cash and time to the medical school. After a then-unprecedented $100 million was donated to the school, it renamed itself the Weill Cornell Medical College in 1998. That came just months after Mr. Weill orchestrated the megamerger that birthed Citigroup.

All told, he and his wife, Joan, have given over half a billion dollars to finance the creation of new facilities and research programs at the school.

The leadership transition is one of the biggest shifts to date in Mr. Weill’s philanthropic career. Even at 81, he remains chairman of Carnegie Hall, a champion of the benefits of musical education programs. And he is still the chairman of the National Academy Foundation, which he founded to prepare schoolchildren for higher education and careers.

Still, over the last few years he began openly discussing finding someone to take the reins at Weill Cornell. He and his wife now spend about half of their year on their 362-acre ranch in Sonoma County in California, and he increasingly felt that the time was nearing to appoint a successor.

“I felt like it was a good time for younger blood,” he said.

Ultimately, he decided upon his daughter, who joined Weill Cornell’s board in 2004 and quickly became immersed in the oversight of the school. (Her father boasted that she had never missed a board meeting.)

As she spent more time on the board, Ms. Bibliowicz, 55, had more time to devote to the school as well. She sold her wealth management concern, National Financial Partners, to the private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners last year for $1.3 billion.

“It’s hard to be an overseer and not be engaged,” she said. “You have to want to dedicate the time.”

Still, Mr. Weill said that he had to be sure that picking his daughter was the right decision, with the choice of a relative sure to be scrutinized. Ultimately, the board signed off on the appointment.

“She is a person of enormous energy and passion,” Laurie H. Glimcher, the dean of Weill Cornell, said in an interview. “I think she’s going to bring her energy, her connections and her passion for medicine and medical research and education to the role.”

For both father and daughter, the dedication to Weill Cornell arises from common ground. Both are strong supporters of their alma mater, Cornell, and both are dedicated to elevating the prominence and reach of the university.

(Not shy about talking up the school, Mr. Weill declared that new campus on Roosevelt Island for the Cornell graduate school for technology will become to New York City today “what the Erie Canal was to New York in the 19th century.”)

For Mr. Weill, that has meant broadening Weill Cornell far past the confines of New York City. During his tenure, he has pushed the school into new programs: a campus in Doha, Qatar; an outpost in Tanzania; an AIDS clinic in Haiti.

But it has also meant giving their wealth to charitable causes, and inspiring other business magnates to do the same, making up for what Mr. Weill described as declining spending by all layers of government. “The private sector has to be much more involved, and the public sector has to be more open to that,” he said.

To potential donors, few philanthropic concerns appear more attractive than health. But in Ms. Bibliowicz’s estimation, these individuals will demand returns on what they see as investments of another kind.

“Their philanthropy is very much about, ‘I worked hard, I want to give back, but I want to mirror my business career,’ ” she said.

That outlook, she says, will inform her tenure as Weill Cornell’s chairwoman, as the school continues to focus on three main areas: students, research and patient care. But showing them the work that the school does, from new developments in deep brain stimulation to sequencing the prostate cancer genome to creating a prosthetic retina, more than impresses donors.

“We’re going to get more cures, better cures,” she said.

Though Ms. Bibliowicz will assume leadership of the medical school’s board, her father insists that he will remain involved.

“I’m a sticker,” Mr. Weill said.

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