Lee Gift Biggest to Central Fund

The $22 million gift donated by Thomas H. Lee '65 to Harvard this week comes at an important juncture in the University's $2.1 billion capital campaign.

The campaign stands at about 60 percent of its goal, having passed the $1 billion mark this spring.

Development Office officials say that since the University has already reached out to many of its biggest donors, raising funds for the second half of the campaign will be more difficult. As former vice president of development and alumni affairs Fred L. Glimp '50 once quipped, "The first billion is always the easiest."

While it is by far the largest gift in recent months, this gift follows a trend of increased donations that development officers say began at the start of this year, continuing through the class reunions this spring.

But the gift, the sixth-largest in the University's history, is atypical of the way large donors have generally allocated funds up to this point. Instead of earmarking his donation for a particular school or project, Lee gave Harvard unprecedented freedom in allocating the donation, classing $19 million of it as unrestricted funds.

About $9.5 million will go to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to be distributed by Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles. The other half of the undesignated funds, however, will go to the newly-created "central fund," which will be spent at the discretion of President Neil L. Rudenstine.

The central fund is at the heart of Rudenstine's vision to bring the diverse and often divergent parts of the University together through increased cooperation and inter-faculty initiatives between Harvard's schools.

Heretofore, no major gifts to the central fund have been announced, and the latest totals for the capital campaign released by the University show this area lagging far behind the fundraising campaigns of the different schools.

In the past, administrators from Rudenstine on down have said this lack of activity in the central fund was expected and even planned.

Thomas M. Reardon, the new vice president for development and alumni affairs, explains the disparity by saying, "There are no alumni of the central administration and there are no graduates of inter-faculty initiatives."

Administrators also say the lack of donations was the result of a strategic decision to concentrate on the fundraising of the individual schools during the first half of the campaign before attempting to raise capital for the central fund during the second half.

The fact that $9.5 million of Lee's donation ended up in the central fund is, however, more serendipitous than strategic--Lee says it is his general philosophy that the organizations to which he gives know better what to do with the money than he.

Lee says he is supportive of Rudenstine's efforts to increase the role of the central administration, comparing the need for central funds to the need for a central government to provide services to its citizens.

Still, the decision to allocate $9.5 million to the central fund was made by Rudenstine and Knowles, not Lee. All efforts on the part of the University to recruit funds for this area are yet unfulfilled