A physics professor was opening his mail when he found a box. Inside was $180,000 from an anonymous donor.
CBSN
It started out as a normal day for Vinod Menon, professor and chair of physics at City College of New York in Harlem. He was back to in-person teaching and went to the school's physics office on September 1 to find a pile of mail had accumulated. Most of it was junk, he said – but there was also a box.
"I opened it, there was a letter inside that said wonderful things about the education this person had received," Menon told CBS News. "That person wanted to give back in some way."
The letter writer was anonymous – only identifying themselves as a City College student from "long ago" who also went to Stuyvesant High School, one of the New York City's elite, competitive high schools. The person said they got undergraduate and master's degrees at the college, and ended up getting a Ph.D. in physics and astronomy. But the school still couldn't place the person using the information they had, Menon said.
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