Published
A physics professor from New York City College was amazed when he came back to his office after months of absence and opened a package.
A letter was enclosed with the anonymous donation.
The City College of New York
New York City College in the Harlem borough of New York.
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The anonymous donation came from a former college student.
First it had to be checked that the money did not come from criminal activities.
The donation can be used to finance two full scholarships each year for over a decade.
When Vinod Menon, a physics professor at the City College of New York in Harlem, was teaching in person again that semester, he looked through a pile of office mail and found a box the size of a toaster. The box was so heavy that the person who posted it at the post office had to pay $ 90 postage for it.
The box was addressed to the “chairman of the physics department”, i.e. the professor himself. The package was postmarked on November 10, 2020. So it had been in the campus post office and then in the physics office for more than nine months, like the one “New York Times” reported.
Vinod Menon thought it might be a thank you from a former student. But it was not like that. The box was full of $ 50 and $ 100 bills that were neatly bundled together. The total amount: a whopping 180,000 US dollars. In an attached letter to Dr. Menon was told that the money was donated to help needy physics and math students at City College. The college annual fee is around $ 7,500.
The professor told the New York Times: “It was a complete shock – I know a lot of academics and have never heard of anything like it. I didn’t know whether the university would accept cash, so whether we could keep it. ”
The big donation was a thank you to City College
In the enclosed letter, the anonymous donation is described as follows: «Assuming that you are a little curious as to why I am doing this, the reason is very simple. A long time ago, I had the privilege of taking advantage of the excellent educational opportunities at college and getting a bachelor’s and master’s degree in physics from City College. ” This resulted in the person having had a long, productive, and immensely rewarding academic career.
Since the coronavirus pandemic paralyzed mail delivery on campus, the inconspicuous box probably lay in the college’s main post office for months like a “normal, everyday parcel” and was finally taken to Dr. Brought to Menon’s office, likely in March, said Robin Cruz, who runs the mailroom.
Is it black money?
The money was treated “like evidence” and was kept in a vault in the Public Security Bureau. Its officials contacted the federal authorities “to find out whether it might be proceeds from criminal activities,” as an employee of the college said.
Using information about the tapes that the money was bundled in, federal officials found that it had been withdrawn from several Maryland banks in recent years and was unrelated to criminal activity, the police chief said.
The professor told the New York Times that the money would have a big impact on the field of physics. The donation could be used to finance two full scholarships each year for over a decade.
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