Joan Jacobs, one half of a powerhouse philanthropic couple whose gifts have shaped the cultural, scientific and educational landscapes of San Diego, died late Monday at the hospital that bore her name. She was 91.
Her ing was confirmed Tuesday by the office of Rep. Sara Jacobs, one of Jacobs’ many grandchildren. She died of heart failure after being diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis in December 2019.
“She pushed me and everyone around her to be the best versions of themselves, and I’m forever grateful for that,” the Congress member said.
“She showed me that I could be feminine and win an argument, I could be a wife and mother and grandmother and also a leader, and I could chart my own path in life while still ing and giving back to my community,” said Jacobs, D-San Diego. “I am who I am because I am her granddaughter.”
Joan Jacobs and her husband of 70 years, Irwin, have almost single-handedly rewritten the cultural history of San Diego, their adopted hometown.
The couple migrated west after Irwin left a teaching position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help grow the then-fledgling UC San Diego. Irwin Jacobs went on to co-found the telecommunications giant Qualcomm, and the couple donated hundreds of millions of dollars to various local causes and institutions.
They include the San Diego Symphony, UCSD, the Central Library, the La Jolla Playhouse, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Salk Institute, among many others.
“She saw everything,” said Debby Buchholz, managing director of the La Jolla Playhouse. “She was an active and important board member in addition to all of the financial . She was the moral com of the Playhouse in many respects.
“She always helped us circle back to the mission.”
In 2010, Joan and Irwin Jacobs were among the original 40 signers of the “Giving Pledge,” a campaign organized by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates to encourage people to donate most of their wealth “to address some of society’s most pressing problems.”
“We both came from very humble homes,” Joan Jacobs told the Union-Tribune in a 2017 interview. “We’re very fortunate to be able to do what we’re doing now.”
She also served on the boards of other arts, educational and health care organizations across the city, helping to guide cultural programming and museum acquisitions.
Her many awards include the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, the Helen Bull Vandervort Alumni Achievement Award from Cornell University, and the Philanthropy in the Arts Award from Americans for the Arts.
Jacobs was born Joan Klein on Jan. 17, 1933, in New York City. She often said she came from modest roots, but her family always appreciated music and the arts.
She was accepted into the Barnard School for Girls in Upper Manhattan, however, her interests were not limited to liberal arts and culture. She later enrolled in Cornell University, where she earned a bachelor of science degree in 1954 from the College of Human Ecology.
Cornell is also where she met her future husband, Irwin Jacobs, whom she married the same year she was awarded her college degree.
Trained as a dietitian, Jacobs worked for the Groton Central School District in upstate New York and later took a position at Boston Lying-in Hospital, now known as Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
She and her husband moved to San Diego in 1966 after he accepted a job to help start the engineering department at UC San Diego. They bought a lot in La Jolla in 1968 and built a house that became their home for decades to come.
The couple raised four sons as Irwin and several UCSD colleagues first built a technology company they called Linkabit.
Some 15 years later, he co-founded Qualcomm, which has become one of the leading technology providers in the world. The computing giant is also one of the region’s largest private employers — and taxpayers.
The Jacobses had been quietly donating money to San Diego-area nonprofits for many years when they made a huge splash in 2002 by pledging $120 million to the once-bankrupt San Diego Symphony.
Described in a Union-Tribune story at the time as “movers and shakers who avoid the limelight, cultural ers who don’t flaunt their clout,” they initially wanted to keep their names out of any announcement about the gift.
“We changed our minds when we realized that it would be impossible to keep something like that a secret,” Joan Jacobs said back then. “The word would get out.”
The couple’s name has since been affixed to institutions across the region.
Other $100 million gifts have subsequently been made to the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD and to the university’s Jacobs Medical Center, which opened in late 2016.
“Their contributions are immeasurable,” said Patty Maysent, the chief executive at UC San Diego Health. “When we opened that building it was one of a kind, probably the best thought-out, best-built hospital in the country.”
Maysent credited Jacobs with redefining the health care experience by creating a place where the comfort of patients and their families was paramount, where sick people and worried relatives would confront their challenges surrounded by inspired art and designs.
“Joan knew exactly what she wanted and what type of feeling she wanted to create within the hospital,” she said. “I see Joan everywhere because I sat there with her and I watched her pick every piece of art that’s in this building.”
The Joan K. Jacobs Healing Arts Collection at the Jacobs Medical Center now includes some 150 pieces, many of them by internationally recognized artists, such as Jeff Koons, Jennifer Steinkamp and Damian Hirst.
“What we hope to create with the artwork is an uplifting environment that fosters warmth, comfort and inspiration,” Jacobs said in a statement about the collection a few years ago. “The goal is to increase feelings of well-being while promoting healing.”
The Jacobses’ philanthropy has extended well beyond the arts.
In 2005, after a theft scandal threatened to close the San Diego Food Bank, the couple stepped forward with businessman Stephen Cushman to the charity.
Their donations secured the Miramar area warehouse for what’s now called the Jacobs and Cushman San Diego Food Bank, the nonprofit that was reorganized after Second Harvest — now Feeding America — withdrew its in favor of Feeding America San Diego.
Jacobs also focused her financial to libraries and schools and research.
UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said he learned about Joan Jacobs’ generosity soon after arriving on campus a dozen years ago.
“We had just moved into the chancellors residence, the Geisel House, and she somehow decided the quality of napkins was not good enough,” he ed. “She ordered thousands of these custom Geisel House napkins for the home. That’s the level of care she took.”
Khosla said the Jacobses were fully aware — and appreciative — of the differences they could make in people’s lives.
“Both Joan and Irwin shared a sense of responsibility to society that I have not seen in anybody,” the UCSD chancellor said. “It was so unselfish.”
Albert P. Pisano, dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD, said Joan Jacobs was responsible for infusing arts into the studies of Jacobs School fellows and scholars years ago, when she pinched-hit for her husband during an annual address to students.
“Joan told me the inception story herself,” he said. “In the very early days, Irwin would come and meet with the students to talk to them about technology. One year Irwin couldn’t go, so Joan gave a talk about art and they loved it.”
To this day, students are invited to a nearby performance every year, Pisano said.
“Irwin and Joan would take the whole cohort of scholars to the symphony, the playhouse or whatever cultural event they could find in the spring of each year,” he said.
Martha Gilmer is chief executive of the Jacobs Music Center, home of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra. She said the Jacobses were such familiar guests that performers would regularly glance up from the stage to see the couple enjoying the performance.
“Irwin and Joan have ed this orchestra probably more than any two people have ed a cultural institution in this country,” she said. “They were ionate about so many things and they believed in San Diego as a city.”
Jacobs herself once explained why she and her husband chose local nonprofits as beneficiaries of their philanthropy, estimating that about 75 percent of their donations were directed to causes and institutions in San Diego.
“We love living here,” she said.
Survivors include Irwin; four sons, Gary, Hal, Paul and Jeff Jacobs; as well as many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
A public celebration of life has been scheduled for 11 a.m. Monday at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park.
In lieu of flowers, the family requested donations to the San Diego Symphony, Jewish Family Service, the San Diego Food Bank, La Jolla Playhouse, Museum of Contemporary Art or the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center.
