YIR: Leven, Radow, and Coles Have Major Impact on KSU

Major financial gifts to Kennesaw State University over the years by Michael Coles, Mike Leven, and Norman Radow, have had a major role in the growth of the suburban Atlanta school during the last quarter century.

Coles, who is the honorary namesake of the Kennesaw College of Business Administration, gave the university its first seven-figure contribution in 1994.

Leven, who spent his entire career in hotel management, made a $5 million contribution to expand its School of Management, Entrepreneurship and Hospitality in 2015.

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Radow, who made his first contribution to Kennesaw in 1998, played a major role in restructuring the university’s privately financed Kennesaw University Foundation. In 2020, he donated $9 million to Kennesaw College of Humanities and Social Sciences, which set a record for individual giving at the school.

Leven is particularly proud of the fact that many of the students are the first members of their families to attend college. That, and what Leven sees as a strong work ethic and a desire to succeed, is what sets KSU students apart from many elite institutions in the northeast.

“The school always had a very diverse body of kids who loved what they were doing and loved the education they were getting,” Leven observed. “Every kid that I met seemed to enjoy the study, the learning experience, and the environment. And this year, everyone who graduated from my hotel management program had a job waiting for them.”

It’s part of the reason Leven believes that Kennesaw has managed to avoid much of the upheaval and the overt acts of antisemitism on some college campuses following the war between Israel and Hamas. The president of the University of Pennsylvania was recently forced to resign following what many perceived to be a lack of support for Jewish students there.

At Harvard University, there is considerable debate over whether the president of that institution, Claudine Gay, who was only recently appointed, should keep her job. A story in the New York Times recently quoted Harvard’s Chabad rabbi as saying that “Jew hate, and anti-Semitism is thriving on this campus.”

Statements by university presidents at Cornell and MIT have also called into question their support for the safety and well-being of Jewish students on their campuses.

Radow and his wife, Lindy, had a brush with pro-Palestinian violence when they were swarmed by a mob on Nov. 10 while on a visit to New York. Police had to intervene to escort them to safety.

“As to the rise of antisemitism on campuses, we are devastated to not only see it mushroom in many places, but to witness its institutional acceptance, if not support, at too many colleges,” Radow commented. “We are glad to see Kennesaw State University is not accepting it, nor tolerating it. But even there, we need to be bold in not just suppressing it, but in creating a long-term climate where anti-Semitism is extinguished at its source.”

The donations and innovations that Leven, Radow, and Coles fostered have helped to grow Kennesaw from one which was mostly commuter based to a school which, today, has a large resident student population. With 43,000 students, it is the second largest university campus in Georgia.