Donors Support Widener, HLS

While the University generally covets large donations with no destinations attached, Harvard's donors put their money where their hearts were this year.

Athletics on campus received a boost to their resources when Robert D. Ziff '88 honored the hockey team with a $2 million gift, endowing the position of the team's coach. And exercise buffs found a newly-stocked Malkin Athletic Center (MAC) beckoning in September, sporting 40 new pieces of cardiovascular equipment thanks to an anonymous donation of an undisclosed amount.

While students are still complaining that the MAC needs a more extensive overhaul, Katherine B. Loker targeted her philanthropy toward another location of deterioration: the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library.

In a sample survey earlier this year, three out of four of Harvard's folios dating from 1800 to 1950 were dubbed "embrittled" as a result of extremes of temperature and humidity. Loker's donation will fund air conditioning, heating and ventilation systems to protect the collections housed in the 80-year-old library.

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles thanked Loker for her sustained generosity to the University at a May fundraising dinner reception at the Fogg Museum.

After having "warmed up the basement of Memorial Hall" with a $10 million gift to create a student commons in 1995, Loker's most recent $17 million donation will help "cool down our collection of books" with climate control mechanisms, Knowles said.

The May dinner honored Rita E. Hauser, who organized and personally contributed $5 million to a new University-wide Women's Matching Fund. The $15 million fund is designed to stimulate philanthropy among women, matching gifts over $25,000 from female donors dollar for dollar.

Radcliffe College announced a $3 million matching fund--a boon to the 119-year-old institution's $100 million current capital campaign--on the same day as the Hauser gift.

And the University's $2.1 billion capital campaign saw two of its biggest gifts directed at individual schools under Harvard's umbrella this year. Albert J. Weatherhead III '50 donated $21 million to "strengthen, expand and endow" international studies at the Center for International Affairs, renamed in honor of the Weatherhead family.

"I think [the gift] is a tribute to my wife," Weatherhead said in November. "We had done four professorships, and she said `Let's raise our sights. Let's do something that's smashing, and that brings to Harvard and to the world something great."

The Law School also received one of the largest windfalls in its history--a $5.4 million gift and bequest from Jack N. Berkman, who received his Harvard J.D. in 1929.

Berkman's donation supports the School's Center for Internet and Society, sponsor of last month's international conference on cyberspace. It also funds the newly-created Berkman Professorship for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, a post held by Lawrence Lessig.

And Carol A. Gilligan became the first Patricia Albjerg Graham professor of gender studies last fall when the Graduate School of Education (GSE) received the $2.5 million from GSE graduates Elisabeth A. Hobbs and Emily H. Fisher and two other anonymous women donors.

The post's namesake served as dean of the GSE from 1982 to 1991, the only woman to serve as dean of any Harvard school.