Brad Freeman and Ron Spogli share how Stanford shaped them
Brad Freeman ’64 and Ron Spogli ’70 are business partners and best friends. Each has served Stanford in many ways, including terms on the Board of Trustees: Spogli currently and Freeman from 1995 to 2005.
When they made a transformational gift to Stanford, the best friends made that gift together, too.
Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies trains an interdisciplinary research and policy lens on the world’s toughest problems. As Stanford’s “coming together place” on world social and policy issues, it houses six major research centers probing such diverse challenges as food security and climate change.
Endowing such an enterprise at Stanford seemed natural, Freeman and Spogli said, because the seeds of their own successes were sown there.
“I was the RA at the Stanford-in-Florence program,” Spogli said. “And although I didn’t know it at the time, it began a series of many important associations with Italy that led to me becoming the United States ambassador to Italy.
“But for those Stanford attachments, it never would have happened.”
Freeman, for his part, had never been west of Montana when he came to Stanford from Fargo, North Dakota, on a football scholarship. “Played 10 seconds in four years,” he demurred. “But I did get my education paid for. … Helped me in the rest of my life.”
After an MBA at Harvard, he joined Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. He ran the firm’s international operations in London before becoming a member of its board.
“Stanford was the most significant factor in my life,” Freeman said. “To give back was just so easy.
“At Freeman Spogli Institute we’re bringing in scholars from all around the world. People get to know each other, develop relationships that I think will play a major role in the future.”
Freeman’s other gifts to Stanford include the endowed Bradford M. Freeman Directorship of Football now held by David Shaw. The precedent-setting gift led to increased visibility and prestige throughout Stanford’s athletic programs.
In 1983, the two founded Freeman Spogli & Co., a private equity investment firm headquartered in Los Angeles. In 2005, the longtime business partners and friends donated $50 million to Stanford’s International Initiative, launched to promote collaboration on campus toward pursuing peace and security; improving governance locally, nationally and globally; and advancing human well-being.
In recognition, the university changed the name of the Stanford Institute for International Studies to the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
FSI exposes Stanford students across all disciplines to global research and internship opportunities. Its alumni achieve global impact as policymakers, advisers and even as documentarians. In 2016, Sharmeen Obaid-Chimoy MS ’03 won her second Academy Award, for her film A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, about violence against women in Pakistan.
“That’s one of the great current perspectives of Stanford, that we all have a responsibility here to think beyond ourselves, in our communities and in our business activities in the United States and beyond,” Spogli said.
“I don’t want that progress to stop,” he said. “I wish that it continues educating young people to have a desire not only to study and learn but to give back in any way they can to the larger world around them.”
Freeman and Spogli spoke in Stanford 125’s Story Dome about the Stanford experiences that shaped them.