Peter Bing, philanthropist who championed Stanford, dies at 91

Peter Bing knew where felt most at home. As an undergraduate at Stanford in the early 1950s, he spent most nights at the Cecil H. Green Library when the day was done, according to the university. He was, by his own account, a shy student. The stacks and the silence suited him. Decades later, when the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake shook the building to its bones he stepped forward to fund its restoration. The wing where he had once studied reopened in 1999 bearing his name. Peter Stephen Bing died on June 10, aged 91, according to Stanford. Martin Shell, Stanford’s vice president for external relations, said Bing moved “generation after generation” to step forward as he had. That was the kind of man he was: unannounced, but reliably present and inclined to leave things better than he found them. Bing grew up in Southern California and arrived at Stanford in 1951, according to the university’s announcement of his death. He graduated in 1955, but not before running for student body president alongside Dianne Goldman, the future Senator Dianne Feinstein. Public life had found him early. Medicine and policy followed: a medical degree from Cornell, a master’s in public health from Harvard, positions in the Kennedy White House, and eventually a role as executive director of the National Advisory Commission on Health Manpower under Johnson. Then, in 1967, he moved back to California, took over the family real estate business, and began a second career that would prove more consequential than the first. According to the university, a card on Bing’s desk carried a line that he attributed to William James: “The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.” He joined Stanford’s Board of Trustees in 1970 and served for more than three decades, according to the university. He and his wife Helen gave with scope and imagination: study-abroad programs, endowed professorships and environmental institutes, according to this publication’s prior reporting. During their frequent visits to campus, the two stayed at what the Stanford report called “a modest motel close to campus.” The man who had transformed nearly every corner of the institution, sleeping a few miles away by choice. And then there was Bing Concert Hall. At its official opening, he stood before the crowd and described what he hoped they had built. “We come here to break ground for a place of concert, in every sense of the word,” he said. “A place for people to gather in harmony, in the union of their shared sensitivities, and mutual interests. A place for the feelings and emotions that solitude permits. Lost in a performance or in the open spaces and the verger outside. A place friendships can flourish. A place for coming together. A place of concert.” “It’s often said that our work defines us,” he once told Stanford. “But I think our nature is more accurately revealed by the volunteer activities that we choose.” He was preceded in death by his son, Stephen Leo Bing, and is survived by his wife, a daughter, two grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter. “Peter understood that a university is not built of stone and mortar alone, but of ideals that are nurtured and shared across time,” Gerhard Casper, who served as Stanford president from 1992 to 2000, said in the university’s announcement. He had been trying, quietly, to live by those ideals since he was a shy boy at a library table, long before anyone thought to put his name above the door.