David H. Ibbeken ’71, who led the Law School Foundation for 28 years and continued to work there as president emeritus, died Monday after a battle with cancer. He was 80.
Ibbeken retired as president and CEO in 2007, but in all spent more than 40 years working at the foundation.
“In his many years of service, Dave turned the Law School Foundation into a professional fundraising effort. We are still building on his legacy in its remarkable success today,” Dean Risa Goluboff said. “He also led with a gentle spirit that touched colleagues and the many other people he connected with over the years. I am so grateful for his friendship and leadership. He was one of a kind, and he will be missed.”
Under Ibbeken’s watch as president, the foundation’s endowment grew from $5 million in 1979 to more than $300 million when he stepped down. Begun as a trust in 1952 and incorporated in 1968, the foundation receives and manages private gifts from alumni and friends for the benefit of the Law School, providing more than $30 million each year to the school’s operating budget.
Raised in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, Ibbeken played on the football team as a student at Princeton. After college he served as a lieutenant in the Army Field Artillery during two years of active duty and later as a captain in the New Jersey National Guard. He coached football and taught at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, and married and started a family with his childhood sweetheart, Sunny, before turning to law school.
“I think my thought was that a law degree could be helpful in any direction you would go. And that in the end, it has proven to be so,” he said in an interview in August for a story marking his 80th birthday for UVA Lawyer.
To help make ends meet in law school, he worked as a student assistant for Admissions Associate Dean Al Turnbull ’62 and as a research assistant for Professor Mason Willrich.
“I developed friendships in law school that go on today and are almost as strong as they were back then,” he said in the interview.
After law school he worked as general counsel for a title insurance company while also teaching a night course to real estate agents at Rutgers University. Then, in 1979, UVA Law Dean Emerson Spies made a job offer that appealed to all of Ibbeken’s interests — leading the still-new Law School Foundation, teaching real estate law (which he would do for 13 years), and helping the Admissions Office.
At the foundation, Ibbeken built a new reunions program and volunteer structure by convincing the foundation’s Board of Trustees that staff, rather than alumni volunteers, should be primarily responsible for fundraising and the affairs of the Alumni Association.
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