http://giving.tufts.edu/why_give/2008profiles/varis.html

http://vet.tufts.edu

http://vet.tufts.edu

http://www.tufts.edu/vet/campus_center/index.html

http://www.tufts.edu/musiccenter/

http://overseers.tufts.edu/?pid=14&c=21

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940CE2D9133EF93AA25753C1A9659C8B63&scp=3&sq=agnes+varis&st=nyt

http://www.agvar.net/

Tufts University - Index

Tufts University - Beyond Boundaries Newsletter Winter 2008 - Index

BEYO ND BOUNDARIES
PROFILE IN GIVING
“Saint Agnes”
A feisty philanthropist’s causes include cats,
jazz musicians, Democrats—and Tufts
Just about everywhere you go at Tufts you’ll
find Agnes Varis, H03. At the Cummings
School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton,
where pet owners take their felines to the
Agnes Varis Cat Ward of the Foster Hospital
for Small Animals, students attend classes in the Agnes
Varis Lecture Hall, will socialize come fall in the new
Agnes Varis Campus Center (below left), and in the
near future, will gather in a new Agnes Varis-funded
auditorium.
At the Granoff Music Center on the Medford/
Somerville campus (below right), aspiring musicians
learn about their craft in the Agnes Varis Music
Lecture Hall and give recitals on the Karl Leichtman
Performance Stage, given in honor of her husband.
And transcending all boundaries of schools and
disciplines is a university-wide professorship she has
News of the Campaign for Tufts Winter 2008
“I see all these young people who want
hope for our country.… Tufts build
mission, and we need it
endowed, the Agnes Varis University Chair in Science
and Society.
What makes her give—and give so widely?
“No one will remember you for how much money
you made in your lifetime, but they will always remember
you for what you did with your money,” says Varis,
citing advice given her by Dr. Henry L. Foster, chairman
emeritus of the Cummings School Board of Overseers.
That credo has informed the broad scope of Varis’
philanthropy. She has given nearly $15 million to the university,
but the impact of her generosity also has been in
the circles of politics, health care, and the arts, of which
she is an outspoken patron.
A dyed-in-the-wool iconoclast
The New York Times has described her as the “Democrats’
Fairy Godmother,” who “seems more like a quirky great
aunt than political powerhouse.” Jazz lovers hailing her
efforts on behalf of down-and-out musicians in New Orleans
after Hurricane Katrina simply call her “Saint Agnes.”
Is she an angel? “No, no, no, no,” Varis says in an
interview. “I am a dyed-in-the-wool iconoclast!”
Born in Lowell, Mass., and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
the youngest of eight children of Greek immigrants, she
has been a force for change ever since her days as a selfdescribed
campus radical at Brooklyn College in the late
1940s. A chemist who struck out on her own to found
Agvar Chemicals in the early 1970s, she went on to make
a fortune as a pioneering woman entrepreneur in the
generic drug industry.
Never losing touch with what she calls her “FDR
New Deal upbringing,” she has battled the big pharmaceutical
companies over policy reform to make
less-expensive generic prescription drugs more widely
available to consumers. At the same time, she has championed
liberal and feminist politics, while donating mil-