Naomi Levine, Lawyer Who Transformed a University, Dies at 97

In 1978, Ms. Levine left the American Jewish Congress and, eager for a new challenge, accepted a position at N.Y.U. She was tasked with helping the troubled institution realize its ambitions of becoming a top-tier university.

At the time, N.Y.U. wasn’t the prestigious academic institution it is today. It had a meager endowment and, with its crumbling campus buildings and drab dormitories, was struggling to attract students. Ms. Levine began leading the university’s charge toward change as its chief fund-raiser, and she quickly proved to be gifted at the strategic art of raising money.

Over the course of two decades, she raised more than $2 billion; toward the end of her tenure, she was raising around $300 million per year. In 1985, she launched an unprecedented $1 billion fund-raising campaign, which earned her some skepticism, but when the feat was accomplished a decade later, the initiative was celebrated as one the most ambitious such efforts in higher education.

By the beginning of the 21st century, N.Y.U. had reinvented itself, and its expansion continued to accelerate through Lower Manhattan. The headline of a 2001 article in The New York Times called Ms. Levine, who was then a senior vice president, the “Dynamo at the Heart of N.Y.U.’s Fund-Raising”; the article noted that the expression “Clear it with Naomi” had become commonplace within the university’s administration.

“It is impossible to overstate Naomi’s contribution to the transformation of N.Y.U.,” John Sexton, the university’s president from 2002 to 2015, said in a phone interview. “Anyone who knows the generative forces that took N.Y.U. from its nadir, which is at the advent of her arrival, to where it was in 2000 and beyond, knows that she was one of the key generators of those forces.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/nyregion/naomi-levine-dead.html