Full Circle
Richard and Susan DeSanti’s connections and reconnections—with BU and each other—inspired their recent gift.
“It’s gratitude. It’s support. It’s excitement about all the fantastic things that BU is doing now.”
That’s Richard DeSanti (CAS’76, LAW’81), listing the reasons he and his wife, Susan DeSanti (LAW’81), recently pledged $125,000 to BU’s School of Law and College of Arts & Sciences. Of that gift, $62,500 will create the DeSanti Family Fund for the School of Law. The fund, which will support the priorities of the dean, honors the couple’s past relationship with BU Law and celebrates their enthusiasm for the school’s future.
As the DeSantis reflect on the benefits of having attended BU Law, they find much to be grateful for—including meeting each other. Richard and Susan met as second-year students on the staff of the Boston University Law Review. But they didn’t have time then for social lives.
“Richard and I were working much too hard in law school,” Susan recalls. “Richard, in particular, was spending 16-hour days as editor-in-chief of Law Review, so dating was not something that was on our minds.” After graduation, though, both Richard and Susan moved to Washington, DC. “I wanted to be in DC after graduation,” says Susan, “because I had always been interested in working for the federal government.” In the early 1980s, however, the federal government was downsizing, so she instead took a job in private practice and eventually went to the DC law firm Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells), where she discovered her talent for antitrust law, a subject she had enjoyed studying under BU Law Professor Joseph Brodley.
Richard left his beloved Boston to move to DC for a one-year clerkship with Judge Spottswood W. Robinson III, the first black chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and a renowned civil rights attorney who helped argue the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in the US Supreme Court. When Richard’s clerkship ended, he accepted a position in the DC offices of Covington & Burling, largely because the job allowed him to stay close to Susan. In DC, Richard and Susan found time for budding law careers and a growing relationship. They were married by Judge Robinson in 1984.
The couple now credits BU for planting the seeds of their marriage and for providing the tools to build rewarding legal careers. “I got an excellent education at BU Law,” says Susan. “I’ve always felt that BU gave me the best foundation possible for being a lawyer.”
After making partner at Hogan & Hartson, Susan decided it was time for a change of pace, and in 1991 she took a job at the Federal Trade Commission. “And then I got really fortunate,” she says. “In 1995, when Robert Pitofsky, who was a giant in the antitrust field, came in as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, he decided that he wanted to have an agency-wide policy shop, and he chose me to head that up.”
Susan loved her job as director of policy planning for the FTC. “I got to hold hearings on antitrust law, bringing all the brightest minds in to talk about various issues and write reports about them,” she says. In the early 2000s, when thousands of patents—many of them questionable and overlapping—were being issued for computer software and hardware, her office published a highly influential report with recommendations for bringing the patent system back into balance with competition policy.
Meanwhile, Richard was building a career in environmental law, first in private practice and then in-house at Mobil Corporation, which became ExxonMobil, and then at Chevron. The work brought together the legal skills he learned at BU Law and the expertise he gained studying geography as an undergrad at BU’s College of Arts & Sciences (CAS). “In the geography program of that day,” he explains, “there was a significant focus on economic geography, which is how economic activity happens over the landscape and how the landscape and the economy interact. I found all of that fascinating.”
Over the years, Richard also became interested in law management, and he has enjoyed the leadership and management aspects of running several law groups. “Lawyers are generally not known for being great managers,” Susan says, “but Richard really is a terrific manager.” It’s one of the first things she noticed about him, she says, when they were on Law Review together at BU.
The DeSantis relocated to California in 2012, where Richard is currently chief environmental and safety counsel for Chevron and Susan is discovering the joys of retirement. Their gratitude to BU continues to grow as they watch their daughter, Elena, thrive as an undergraduate psychology major at CAS. Both Richard and Susan say they were very impressed by the quality of the BU campus tour and freshman orientation sessions they attended with Elena. “It was so well done and thoughtful,” Richard says. “It really made me proud as an alum.”
As they’ve reconnected with their alma mater as parents of a BU student and as members of reunion, advisory, and fundraising committees, the DeSantis say they’ve been thrilled to witness the University’s forward momentum.
“Every time I attend a presentation about what’s going on at BU, I’m amazed and intrigued by everything that’s happening at the University,” Richard says.
“There’s nobody at BU—either in the College of Arts & Sciences or at the law school—who’s just sitting still,” says Susan, adding that she was particularly impressed with the leadership at BU Law and the many new and practical programs that have been introduced recently.
In making their recent gift to BU Law, the DeSantis took advantage of two corporate matching programs to multiply their generosity. Chevron, Richard’s current employer, matches educational gifts one to one, and ExxonMobil, where Richard is a retiree, matches his gifts at a ratio of three to one. When the DeSantis pledged their gift to BU Law—$12,500 of their own funds and $50,000 in matching funds—they made an identical pledge to CAS and asked that the money be spent at the discretion of each school’s dean.
“We see all these ideas coming from the great deans that BU has,” says Richard, “and we wanted to give them the flexibility to pursue ideas where a little bit of money can help do something interesting and exciting.”
This feature originally appeared in The Record, BU Law’s alumni magazine. Read the full issue here.
Reported by Corinne Steinbrenner (COM’06)
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