David A. Duffield, the founder of PeopleSoft and Workday, is giving $371.5 million to Cornell University, largely to endow the Ivy League school’s engineering college, which will be named after him.
The gift pushes Duffield’s total philanthropy to the school to $550 million, making him one of the largest university benefactors in the country.
Duffield, 85 years old, received an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Cornell in 1962 and earned his M.B.A. there two years later.
Duffield started meeting with Cornell Engineering Dean Lynden Archer about five years ago. The two men spoke at length about building students’ problem-solving skills. “I see this basically as a vote of confidence in our ability to develop people,” Archer said.
Duffield was born in Ohio and grew up in New Jersey, where he said math was his favorite subject. He arrived at Cornell at the dawn of the computer age and said he discovered a love for programming. “My brain was just wired to solve problems logically,” he said.
Cornell was an early adopter of mainframes and his professor mentors were moving from punch cards to mainframe batch processing. Duffield cut his teeth writing programs to make computers more accessible for students and faculty.
His idea for PeopleSoft came when he was sitting on a beach in Maui, “thinking about how to take advantage of this shift for the mainframe enterprise software company I was with at the time.” When his boss rejected his idea to integrate the new technology, he went out on his own and started PeopleSoft with a partner.
After he funded Duffield Hall for nanoscale science at Cornell in 1997, the school asked him to consider a naming gift for the engineering college. At the time, Duffield felt it was beyond his means.
After the success of Workday, Cornell approached him again.
“It was my wife who pushed me over the naming line,” he said. “She knew I was feeling positive about Duffield Hall and the university leadership, and she simply pointed out that it was time for the next step.”
