Institutional Infidelity

The systemic disregard for women in philanthropic couples, why it is wrong, and why it should alarm all of us.

Photo by Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash

A condensed version of this article was published by the Los Angeles Times, June 11, 2026.

By Erica Wertheim Zohar

Two major American universities were asked to do one thing after my mother died: acknowledge her passing. She was a woman whose name was on the Foundation she co-created, the Dr. Herbert & Nicole Wertheim Family Foundation, and on the gift agreements and legal contracts that pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to institutions across the country over the course of her lifetime. She had been among the most significant donors in their institutional histories.

Both refused.

One, UC-Berkeley, had a tribute written and ready to publish – but an administrator decided it was only “fair and transparent” to consult her ex-husband first. That would be my father, the man she had divorced after 55 years of marriage, a divorce that was finalized a year and a half before her death. The tribute was shelved.

The other, the University of Florida, said it wanted to be “responsive” but also needed to consult my father first. It then declined entirely, citing vague legal considerations it has never specified.

Her name is still on their gift agreements.

There is a pattern in American philanthropy I have come to call Institutional Infidelity: the minimizing and quiet reassignment of a woman’s philanthropic identity to her husband, whenever she becomes inconvenient. I watched it happen to my mother.

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For nearly fifty years, Nicole Wertheim was a builder. Beginning in 1977, she and my father used earnings from their growing business to establish the Dr. Herbert & Nicole Wertheim Family Foundation from almost nothing. “We were both very hard-working and we had nothing,” she said in a 2019 interview. “We just wanted to build something together.” What followed became one of the most consequential philanthropic partnerships in the history of American higher education.

The results are visible and permanent. The Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing & Health Sciences at Florida International University, established and named in her honor, has trained thousands of nurses. At FIU, Foundation support also extended to the Wertheim College of Medicine, the Wertheim Performing Arts Center, the Wertheim Conservatory, and the Wertheim School of Music. Beyond FIU, Wertheim-funded programs shaped engineering education at the University of Florida through a $50 million gift, and a landmark $100 million gift created the Wertheim UF-Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology. Wertheim Family Foundation funding advanced optometry research at the UC-Berkeley School of Optometry, and supported public health initiatives at UC San Diego. In nearly 50 years of giving, the Foundation my mother co-created directed close to $300 million toward American higher education. These contributions were the product of nearly five decades of shared labor, shared capital, and shared decision-making, and the money behind them came from both partners, equally.

My mother was not a passive figure in this work. Her name was on the Foundation itself, the Dr. Herbert & Nicole Wertheim Family Foundation, and on the gift agreements and legal contracts that formalized every major gift. The word “Family” in the Foundation’s name was not decorative. It was a declaration of intent - her declaration - that what she and my father built would grow across generations. She gave as a full participant in creating that wealth, not as a recipient of it. She was not a plus one. She was a founder and a pillar of the philanthropic community, and was recognized as such by both the Miami Herald and Forbes.

She died on April 20 of this year. She was 82.

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In the weeks that followed, I contacted four major universities that had received significant philanthropic support through the Wertheim Family Foundation. I respectfully asked each institution to acknowledge her passing among their communities. I expected that institutions whose programs and endowments were built on her Foundation’s money, institutions that had accepted hundreds of millions of dollars bearing her name, would respond as they had when accepting those gifts: readily, and with gratitude.

Two institutions, Florida International University and UC San Diego, responded promptly and with appropriate dignity. Two did not.

The University of Florida, which has received $150 million in Wertheim Foundation support - and much more in matching support - indicated it wanted to “be responsive” but first needed to notify my father before proceeding. It subsequently declined to issue any public statement at all, dubiously citing unspecified legal considerations. Perhaps most telling of what the university leadership actually thought of my mother is this: in all the written correspondence between me and university representatives in the days following her death, the advancement office did not offer a single word of condolence. Two of the three key advancement officers I reached out to failed to even respond. Sometimes it is the words not said that speak the loudest.

UC-Berkeley, recipient of a $50 million gift for its School of Optometry, was initially enthusiastic about moving forward with a tribute, then abruptly paused it, concluding it was “fair and transparent” to consult my father first. His marriage to my mother had ended eighteen months earlier, at her own initiative. Perhaps a shorter piece might eventually be written, Berkeley suggested, “at the right time, if possible.” Which begs the question… what better time would there be than in the immediate aftermath of her death?

A man she had been divorced from for well over a year had been granted effective veto power over her obituary.

These were considered institutional decisions, made by administrators who understood the calculus clearly. One party to the former marriage still controlled Foundation assets, and alienating him carried financial risk. Failing to honor my mother carried none. The Wertheim name on their contracts and endowments and buildings did not dissolve with her marriage. It did not expire at her death. The respect these institutions believed they owed her, it turns out, did.

What I could not have anticipated is that universities whose programs were funded by a Foundation bearing her name would treat the simple acknowledgment of her death as a decision requiring my father’s approval.

* * *

These are not isolated failures of judgment. They are emblematic of a pattern - Institutional Infidelity - the quiet, systemic abandonment of the woman in philanthropic couples by institutions, particularly in periods of conflict, during divorce, or at death. Universities do not describe it this way. They call it stewardship. They call it discretion. They call it sensitivity to a complicated situation. What they are protecting is not legacy. It is access. It is the perceived continuity of future funding.

The pattern rarely announces itself. It accumulates through small, compounding decisions: communications quietly rerouted, deference recalibrated, visibility reassigned. I saw it happen repeatedly during my parents’ divorce. In March 2023, at a naming ceremony connected to a $100 million Wertheim Foundation gift to the University of Florida, held months before my mother filed for divorce, my mother was not present. She did not yet know that her husband was involved with another woman – one younger than his youngest daughter. The university, however, appeared to know, or simply chose not to ask. It welcomed and formally seated his mistress as his guest at an event built on half a century of my parents’ shared philanthropic legacy. When I asked that she not appear in the institution’s official photography for the event, the university’s representatives did not respond. The decisions made that day were not coincidental. They signaled, in a public and permanent setting, who the institution recognized as its relevant partner going forward.

In the most formal contexts, the pattern became a legal matter. During my parents’ divorce, concerns arose about the handling of Foundation-related funds and documentation. It emerged in subsequent litigation that a $100 million binding gift agreement had been executed naming my mother individually as a party and personal guarantor, without her signature appearing on the final document. The institution proceeded regardless. Her name was sufficient to place on the contract. Her actual consent was treated as a formality.

The pattern has continued even after my mother’s death. In the weeks following her passing, the University of Florida hosted an 87th birthday party for my father at the Wertheim UF-Scripps Institute, in a building my mother helped pay for. In a blatant display of ego stroking, the school spent university funds to transform its building lobby into “Herbie’s Yacht Club.” Maria Gutierrez Martin, UF’s senior university-wide advancement officer - the same official whose office declined to issue any public statement acknowledging my mother’s death - presented my father with a personalized nautical flag to fly on his yacht. The university even posted photos from the bash on its official Instagram and social media feed.

My mother’s death was met with silence. My father’s birthday a month later was celebrated with a party hosted by the university that said it could not acknowledge her contributions. The money committed to the university may have come equally, but the contrast in treatment could not be more stark.

* * *

Decisions such as these emerge from a structural gap in how philanthropy operates when a couple separates. There is no widely enforced standard governing how universities treat co-donors after divorce. No requirement for independent, equal communication with both parties. No obligation to maintain parity in recognition or access. No safeguard ensuring that a donor whose name appears on a gift agreement or Foundation retains equal standing once a marriage ends. Institutions default to continuity of funding, aligning themselves with whoever they believe will control future giving. The other donor is gradually reframed as a legacy figure from a prior chapter of the relationship, rather than a principal with standing in the present one.

The ethical problem is uncomplicated. Philanthropic gifts made by couples are the result of joint effort, joint capital, and joint commitment. When institutions accept those gifts, they enter into a relationship with two people. That obligation does not dissolve when the marriage does.

* * *

What happened to my mother reflects something larger than one family’s experience. American philanthropy has a structural blindness about who is actually driving charitable giving, and that blindness is becoming harder to sustain.

Research from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy finds that women now influence or make 85 percent of a family’s philanthropy-related decisions, and are more likely than men of equivalent means to give at all. Development offices that structure their relationships primarily around the male partner are not simply being inequitable; they are misreading their own donor base.

The MacKenzie Scott example has become familiar, but its implications have not fully landed. During her marriage to Jeff Bezos, Scott was among the least publicly visible figures in American philanthropy, despite a foundational role in Amazon’s early years. Since their 2019 divorce, she has donated more than $26 billion, averaging more than $5 billion annually, making her one of the most consequential philanthropists in American history. Her giving in 2025 alone surpassed Bezos’s total lifetime charitable contributions. The woman institutions once treated as the secondary partner became the more significant philanthropic force by almost any measure.

Scott is an exceptional case in scale. The dynamic she represents, however, is not. It repeats across American giving at every level of wealth. And, more and more, the women at the center of that pattern are watching how the institutions they support choose to treat them.

* * *

This is where philanthropy’s ethical failure and its institutional self-interest meet, because the habit of sidelining women is not only wrong, it is becoming financially consequential.

By 2030, McKinsey projects that women will control approximately $34 trillion of wealth transfer expected from baby boomers. They will inherit from aging parents and, in most heterosexual couples, from husbands they outlive. They are already the primary or equal decision-makers in the vast majority of high-net-worth philanthropic households. Research shows that 70 percent of women change their financial advisor after a spouse’s death, a number that reflects how poorly institutions have cultivated relationships with women as independent principals, rather than as one half of a couple.

Philanthropy is making the same mistake. Institutions that signal, through their behavior in moments of conflict, divorce, or death, that a woman’s standing is derivative of her husband’s are not simply failing the women in front of them. They are making a long-term error about where the giving will come from. The women writing the checks are paying attention. And they have choices.

The remedies are straightforward. Gift agreements involving couples should require explicit dual signatures, conferring equal legal standing to both parties. Development offices should maintain independent, equal communication with both donors regardless of marital status, and must not quietly redirect that communication the moment one spouse files for divorce. Stewardship of a donor’s legacy should follow her expressed wishes and those of her designated heirs, not default to the more powerful party. These are not radical standards. They are the minimum that every serious business partnership already requires. Their absence in philanthropy is not an oversight. It is a habit. And it is an increasingly troubling and costly one.

* * *

Every major American university operates under a written commitment to integrity, fairness, and the equal dignity of every individual who engages with the institution. But when honoring those commitments carries a perceived financial risk, the calculus changes.

These institutions accepted my mother’s partnership and her Foundation’s money without reservation or delay. Yet, the University of Florida and UC-Berkeley had trouble treating her with dignity at the times when it mattered the most, proving incapable of even publicly acknowledging her death and generous contributions without permission from a man she was no longer married to.

My mother spent more than 50 years building a philanthropic legacy she believed would outlast her. She was a co-author of a vision she funded and shaped from its inception. The institutions that benefited from her life’s work were not asked to take sides in a private family dispute; they were asked simply to honor what was already written on their own walls. Instead, they defaulted to a version of power that should be a relic of the past.

That is the quiet architecture of Institutional Infidelity: keeping the woman’s name on the contract while stripping away her humanity. American philanthropy will not resolve this crisis until its institutions are willing to examine what they do when the money is already in the bank, and only the principle remains.

Legacy is not discretionary. And a woman who spent her life building it should never need permission to be remembered.

My mother deserves better. Much better.

* * *

This article reflects the opinion of the author based on personal experience.