Steadfast Donor Keeps His Word to Tulane

October 17, 2007

Keith Brannon
kbrannon@tulane.edu

Sometimes keeping your word comes at a price. Perhaps no one knows that better than neurosurgeon Jim Doty, who, through an unexpected turn of events, ended up giving away 99 percent of his net worth to keep his promise to Tulane and others.

Doty, 51, gave stock worth approximately $4.4 million to the Tulane University School of Medicine. It is one of the largest individual gifts ever made to the school by an alumnus.

At the time he made the gift, he had no idea he would be parting with what would turn out to be his entire personal fortune.

It all started back in the beginning of 2000 at the height of the dot-com boom. Doty, while a professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University, had accumulated about $75 million in paper profits from investments in medical technology companies, including one called Accuray. He pledged to donate a substantial amount of Accuray’s stock to benefit several institutions, such as Tulane and Stanford universities.

Doty planned to retire early and was buying a $5 million San Francisco apartment, a 6,500-acre island in New Zealand and a villa in Tuscany. He planned to spend part of his retirement volunteering his services as a neurosurgeon in Third World countries. All that changed in a matter of weeks as investors started dumping technology stocks. Soon the entire sector crashed amidst the dot-com meltdown.

“Suddenly I was about $3 million in the hole because everything crashed,” Doty says. “In fact, one of the stocks that I had a significant interest in was at $78 at its high. Within six weeks, it went down to 60 cents. So, essentially, my paper fortune was gone.”

Gone save for one viable asset: stock in privately held Accuray. The company wasn’t public yet so the stock’s value was unknown. Doty guessed it was worth a few million. Through a stroke of luck, the paperwork on the Accuray donation hadn’t been signed. Doty’s lawyers told him he could legally step back from his promise if he wanted.

“I struggled with this for quite some time, actually,” Doty says. “I spoke with several friends of mine who said, ‘Look, you just lost everything. You’re in the hole. Accuray has not gone public, and it may never do anything, but at least you still have something.’”

Even his future wife told him he would be crazy not to hold onto the stock. But Doty couldn’t bring himself to do it. He felt a moral obligation to keep his word no matter the circumstances.

“This is what I have to do for me,” he says. “I do have a certain moral compass that is independent of the input of other people. It is my own compass and that is what I try to go by.”

He signed the paperwork setting up a charitable trust for the stock. When Accuray went public earlier this year, Doty’s charitable fund was valued at a whopping $37 million — far higher than he ever expected. Tulane’s portion turned out to be worth $4.4 million.

Doty has no regrets. “I am fortunate that I had the opportunity to do this,” says Doty, who is currently director of Neurosciences and Rehabilitation for Memorial Hospital-Gulfport in Gulfport, Miss. “I get to help people every day. I am the luckiest guy in the world.”

Doty is a 1981 graduate of Tulane School of Medicine. His donation will establish two endowed chairs, fund scholarships for socioeconomically disadvantaged students and help renovate the medical library, among other things.

He has requested the scholarships be named in honor of two of his earliest mentors when his first came to Tulane in 1975 to attend the Medical Education Reinforcement and Enrichment Program (MEdREP), a summer program for minority and economically disadvantaged students interested in pursuing a career in medicine. MedREP helped him form relationships with medical school faculty that ultimately led to his acceptance in the graduate program. Doty, whose family was on welfare for most of his childhood, struggled in school before attending college.

“I went to that program for the summer, and it was life-changing for me. It gave me the chance to interact with people who could see that I had the drive, the intelligence and motivation to succeed in medical school,” he says.

It is Doty’s wish that the scholarships be named after MedREP’s founder Anna Cherrie Epps, and physician Morris Spirtes, whose lab Doty worked in while he was involved in the program.