The Tufts University School of Engineering wants to put more emphasis on graduating students with leadership skills, and now it has an extra $40-million to do the job.

The university announced the donation today from Bernard M. Gordon, an inventor who is the founder and former chairman of the Analogic Corporation. The provost of Tufts, Jamshed J. Bharucha, said the engineering school would use the money to expand a program that includes project-based opportunities for students to get hands-on experience in the private sector. The university's plans for Mr. Gordon's money also include offering an undergraduate minor in engineering leadership and expanding a "professors of the practice" program, in which Tufts hires faculty members who have spent their careers as actual engineers in industry or government rather than as professors in an academic setting, Mr. Bharucha said.

Mr. Gordon has now made nearly $200-million in donations to support engineering education worldwide. The gift to Tufts—a campus where he studied for several months in 1944 as part of a Navy officer-training program—is his largest. The donation "represents the confidence he has in our commitment to try to do things differently," Mr. Bharucha said. "There is a tendency for some academic engineering to become fairly esoteric." --Paul Basken