Occidental Trustees Told Gift Tied to L.A. School Board Bid
Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad offered to donate $10 million to Occidental College while seeking to persuade the school's president to run against L.A. school board trustee David Tokofsky, The Times has learned.
College President Theodore R. Mitchell confirmed in an interview late Thursday that he had been in discussions over the past week with Broad and former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan about seeking the seat on the seven-member board of the Los Angeles Unified School District but decided against running in the spring election.
Mitchell told college trustees Wednesday that Broad would give the money to the Eagle Rock institution if he would declare his candidacy, according to participants in that discussion.
Mitchell asked trustees for their approval to remain campus president if he won the seat, said the participants who requested not to be identified, but trustees disapproved of the idea.
Mitchell said he would not divulge what he discussed with the Occidental trustees. The former UCLA vice chancellor and Getty Trust executive said he had talked with Broad about helping to finance an education leadership institute at Occidental, but added that it was unrelated to his potential candidacy.
Broad's spokeswoman, Melissa Bonney Ratcliff, said that Broad had been considering a gift to Occidental at the same time he was encouraging Mitchell to run for Tokofsky's seat but that the timing was coincidental and was not linked to Mitchell's candidacy. Ratcliff said Broad was not available for comment Thursday.
Mitchell said he was impatient with the pace of reform in L.A. Unified, the nation's second-largest school district. But after talking with several people about Tokofsky's re-election chances and about his own odds, Mitchell said, he decided not to run.
"What I discovered was that David has broad and deep community support," he said.
Mitchell, a former education advisor to Riordan, told about a dozen college trustees in a special meeting on the issue how Broad and Riordan asked him to run and how Broad offered the college the donation, according to sources at the gathering. Mitchell, in New York, spoke to the trustees, who assembled at the college, by speaker phone.
