Family Donates $7.5M To HBS

Harvard Business School (HBS) announced Tuesday that it has received a $7.5 million gift from a Canadian family, bringing the school closer to its goal of raising $500 million by next year.

The school has raised $420 million since its capital campaign kicked off in September 2002, including $58 million specifically slated for financial aid efforts, said Senior Associate Dean Howard H. Stevenson.

The donation from the de Gaspe Beaubien Foundation is earmarked for an effort to make the HBS Baker Library’s Historical Collections accessible electronically, said Stevenson, speaking from Aspen, Colo.

The vast collections include 51 copies of the first edition of Adam Smith’s 1776 treatise Wealth of Nations, as well as handwritten letters by the Scottish economist, Stevenson said.

According to Stevenson, also in the collection are detailed maps of King Louis XIV’s timber holdings.

The gift reflects the Beaubien family’s “deep and abiding interest in history,” Stevenson said.

The Beaubien family’s roots extend generations back into the Quebec fur trade. But after earning an MBA from HBS in 1951, Philippe de Gaspe Beaubien started a Canadian communications firm, the Telemedia Corporation, which today is run by his sons.

“We hope that our gift will increase the knowledge and awareness of this important collection for a wide audience and help reaffirm the fact that it is impossible to look to the future without learning from the past,” the family said in a statement.

Stevenson said the Beaubien family’s gift was one of the 10 largest donations to HBS in the school’s 96-year history.

Arthur Rock, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who helped financed the launches of Intel and Apple Computer, donated $25 million to the school in January 2003. Two months later, Frank Batten, who started the Weather Channel in 1982, gave $32 million to the capital campaign.

He said the donation of gifts to the school has been largely unaffected by the tumultuous economic climate.

The capital campaign builds upon the school’s existing endowment of $1.4 billion—second only to that of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The school’s budget for the 2003 financial year was $286 billion.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.