"There was always a sense of pride about the history of the family in Baltimore," said Elizabeth P. Carey of Pennsylvania, William Carey's niece and a foundation director. "It's sort of a hard family to live up to sometimes, because they have achieved so much."
Born in 1751, James Carey established a successful shipping business in Baltimore's port after the Revolutionary War. He married Martha Ellicott, the granddaughter of Ellicott City's founder, converted to her Quaker faith and helped found the Baltimore Abolition Society, one of the country's first anti-slavery movements.
As his business flourished, Carey turned to civic pursuits. He served 12 terms on the City Council and was president of the Bank of Maryland. In 1802, Carey bought land near the harbor for use by the city's first African-American congregation.
Six generations later, William Polk Carey continued the family's entrepreneurial tradition, but in New York real estate banking. After attending the Gilman School in North Baltimore, which was co-founded by his grandmother, Anne Galbraith Carey, he left for boarding school in Connecticut and then attended Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.
His lifelong dream of a Hopkins business school germinated in the 1950s, but he was unable to persuade a family friend - and Hopkins' president - Milton S. Eisenhower to set up a program at the liberal arts college.
Decades later, after building the W.P. Carey & Co. business into a real estate investment giant managing billions of dollars in assets, Carey was able to sweeten the suggestion with the $50 million gift that would establish the graduate school.
Carey's philanthropic approach is focused not on ministering to the poor or providing social services, as is the driving mission behind the city's biggest foundations, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Harry & Jeannette Weinberg Foundation. Rather, he wants to employ philanthropy as a business incubator.
"Baltimore used to be the cultural center of the United States," Carey said. He attributes the city's economic decline in large part to the acquisition or departure of corporations once based here. "We have to start having enterprises started here that want to stay headquartered in Baltimore, and one of the ways we can do that is by having more business school grads starting here."
Yash Gupta, the Carey Business School's new dean, says the university's model of a "start-up business school" is profoundly influenced by Carey, with whom he speaks regularly.
