New trustee eager to make presence felt

New Trustee Karen Pritzker wants to make it known that she will be a very active member of the Board of Trustees during her five year term, and will not sit quietly.

"I have no intention of sitting there and raising my hand when I'm told to," Pritzker said after her first meeting last Friday.

Pritzker was approved by the Board at last November's meeting, after which she was asked by President Larry Bacow if she would accept the nomination. Potential trustees are not told that they are being considered until they have been approved by the Board.

Pritzker attended Tufts for two and a half years and majored in international relations. Her future husband, Dan Pritzker, graduated from Tufts in 1981. When Dan Pritzker went to Northwestern University for law school, she followed him to Chicago and finished her undergraduate education at the University of Chicago, with a degree in American History.

In recent years, Pritzker worked with Providence St. Mel, a private high school in inner-city Chicago, to raise money for students to attend college. The school has taken in $30 million over the past 15 years, and 100 percent of its graduates now attend college.

The Pritzkers also established the Jay Pritzker Foundation, named after Dan Pritzker's late father, who founded the Hyatt Hotel chain. This year, the foundation began sponsoring the Jay Pritzker Scholarship Challenge Grant at Tufts.

The Pritzkers' grant matches any donations for minority student financial aid at Tufts up to $5 million over the next five years.

Karen Pritzker explained that "with limited funds, the idea is to leverage what you have" by using matching grant programs. So far, trustee Kathryn Cassell Chenault has pledged $1.1 million, and an anonymous donor has pledged another $1 million.

Since they left Tufts, the Pritzkers had been approached by the University and asked if they would contribute. Prior to establishing the minority student financial aid fund, Pritzker said she told then-Provost Sol Gittleman that she and her husband would contribute "when the time was right" and when she was sure that there was "a fair degree of certainty that [the students receiving the aid] would succeed."

Because of Pritzker's experience in financial aid and education reform, Bacow recommended that she sit on the student subcommittee for the Board's Academic Affairs committee. She said that regardless of which committees trustees serve on, their "primary responsibility is fiduciary."

Within the Academic Affairs committee, Pritzker said she will put most of her effort into fundraising. "Everybody has a network," she said.

Pritzker's father was in the U.S. Foreign Service -- he retired after the embassy bombing in Tanzania -- so her childhood was spent in various developing countries. It was this experience of being surrounded by poverty, Pritzker said, that gave her the inspiration and motivation to work for diversity and more affordable education.

Dan Pritzker is the founder of the jazz band Soniadada. The Pritzkers now live in the Bay Area in California, and have five children, ages three, five, seven, thirteen, and fourteen.