Happy Nice Mall

Back in face-to-face teaching this semester, Vinod Menon, a professor of physics at the City College of New York in Harlem, finally looked through a pile of office mail and found a cardboard box the size of a toaster.

The box, heavy enough to warrant $90 in postage for US priority mail, was sent to the “President, Department of Physics,” that is, his title.

Dr. Perhaps it was an expression of thanks from a former student, Menon thought as he examined the package stamped on November 10, 2020. The package is over nine months, first in the campus mailroom, then in the physics office.

49-year-old Dr. for the meno specialized With some breakthroughs in nano and microphotonics in the discovery of the way light interacts with matter at the quantum level, an exciting moment often comes in a campus lab.

But the substance in the cardboard box weighed heavily on him. It was filled with $50 and $100 bills packed in paper tapes, for a total of $180,000.

In an attached letter, Dr. Menon explained that the cash was a donation to help needy physics and math students at City College.

“It was a complete shock – I know a lot of academics and I’ve never heard of anything like it,” he said. “I didn’t know if the college accepted cash, so I didn’t know they would hold it.”

The letter explained the donor’s motivations. “Assuming you’re a little wondering why I’m doing this, the reason is clear,” the donor wrote, saying that attending both Stuyvesant High and Stuyvesant High took advantage of the “excellent educational opportunity” “a long time ago.” Earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics at City College helped to lead to a “long, productive, highly rewarding” scientific career.

The note was unsigned and the name Kyle Paisley in the return address was not listed as a graduate on the college records.

City College has benefited from larger donations. It has raised $17.2 million in funding since the start of the fiscal year in July.

However, Dr. Menon said the gift was worth less than a dollar, and more like “a testament to what the physics department has been providing all these years.”

He noted that because the annual tuition fee at City College is $7,500, the donation would go much further in providing scholarships than an expensive private institution.

Officials at both the college and the entire CUNY system could not recall a similar type of donation. “Kyle Paisley” appears to be a bogus name, Chief Pat Morena, head of the Department of Public Safety at City College, the founding school of the city’s 25-column public university system, the largest public urban university system in the country.

“Who is sending them the $180,000 in currency and is the sender anonymous?” He asked.

It was also notable that the donation was reserved for the physics department, which has a long and distinguished history. In 1921, Albert Einstein earliest US lessons there and the department punched well above its weight, with three of its alumni being Nobel laureates in physics.

With the coronavirus pandemic wheezing delivery on campus, the unobtrusive box likely sat like a “regular, daily package” in the college’s main mail room for months, and eventually along with other backlogs, most likely in March, when Dr. “He was taken to Menon’s office,” he said. Robin Cruz, who runs the mailroom.

However, Dr. Menon has been teaching distance learning since March 2020. He did research from the president’s office in a lab across campus and didn’t check the office mail until the end of the summer.

When he opened the box, he was afraid to even touch the money. “It’s crazy that it just sits in the mail room, or even mailed it – one was too trusting of the system,” Menon said.

Chief Morena said the money was “treated like evidence” and was stored in a vault at the public security office, where officials contacted federal officials “to see if it was possible with proceeds from criminal activities.”

Based on information about the groups packing the money, the chief determined that federal agents had withdrawn from several banks in Maryland in recent years and were not linked to criminal activity.

The address on the package, a real home in Pensacola, Fla., has not led anyone connected with the donation.

Federal postal inspectorate officers did not receive video of the package being sent. After a month-long investigation, authorities told university officials that the identity of the donor was “truly untraceable,” Chief Morena said.

With this, CUNY’s Board of Trustees is officially cleared. vote Accepting the gift at its meeting on December 13.

They did so with astonishing joy.

“This is absolutely amazing, $180,000 cash in a box,” said William C. Thompson, chairman of the board, while promoting the vote.

When asked by a board member if this was a first, CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez replied, “Frankly in a box, I think it’s a first.”

“We should tan that box and put it on display as the most generous gift,” said board member Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez.

He praised the school officials for the following procedure: “They said, ‘We’re not sending this back – we’ll take all due care.’”

Dr. The money would have a huge impact on the department, Menon said, which would lead him to fund two full-tuition scholarships each year for more than a decade. In keeping with the spirit of giving, she said the scholarship would require students to “give back in some way,” perhaps through peer mentoring.

Immigrated from India in 1996, the professor has studied and researched at public and private institutions, including Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Despite offers to teach in elite schools, Dr. Menon said he stayed at City College largely because of its commitment to providing an affordable education to a variety of students, many of whom are immigrants. Many of her students come from families that have never been to college, and many of them have never been to the lab, she said.

“The impact factor of teaching is much higher here,” he said. “A place where you can raise someone.”