Major Fundraiser To Target Life Sciences

Two and a half years after wrapping up a University-wide, $2.6 billion capital campaign, Harvard officials are discussing another massive, multi-school fundraising effort aimed to raise up to $1 billion for the life sciences. Plans remain tentative, however, because of questions about a possible science campus to be built on Harvard’s property in Allston.

If initiated, the new multi-school fundraising effort would include Harvard Medical School (HMS), the School of Public Health (SPH), and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) administrators say.

University President Lawrence H. Summers identified expansion and greater coordination of biological sciences research at the University’s various schools as a top priority early in his first year in office. As long as plans for those initiatives remain sketchy, fundraising goals are only speculative, University officials say.

The planning is also made more complicated by the decision to build a new campus in Allston, Provost Steven E. Hyman said. One scenario for developing University-held land across the river forsees a new science campus, while a second calls for the law school to move to allow FAS science room to grow.

The fundraising effort under discussion would subsume a large HMS campaign already being planned, and would raise hundreds of millions of dollars more for FAS and SPH.

The campaign would benefit “the life sciences, chemistry and related engineering and computer science,” Hyman wrote in an e-mail. Investment is also needed for collaborative projects across the schools, he said.

The $1 billion figure is only a rough estimate, and a full-blown public campaign is only one of the options on the table, Development Office spokesperson Andy Tiedemann said.

Although planning is in its earliest stages, a decision on how to proceed is expected soon. The administration “hopes to have a firmer plan for the science initiatives by the end of the next academic year,” Tiedemann said.

If a traditional “campaign model” were followed, said Tiedemann, a two-year quiet phase would then begin, during which the University would test the fundraising waters and try to raise a third of its overall goal.

A public kick-off could come within three years but the final decision on the effort depends on a decision on what is moving to Allston, Hyman said.

A biological sciences campaign of the size discussed would be a marked acceleration of the University’s fundraising timetable, coming on the heels of the last University-wide campaign.

The $2.6 billion capital campaign conducted during Neil L. Rudenstine’s ten years as president was the biggest in higher education and, at Harvard, the first university-wide effort of its type.

Although individual schools planned campaigns in the next several years—HMS, the business school, and the law school comprising the first wave—University officials had indicated that Rudenstine’s successor would be spared time-consuming multi-school efforts for at least several years.

With Summers’ appointment, many professors expressed satisfaction that they felt they were getting a president who was less a fundraiser than an academic leader—an image which some officials say Summers has cultivated.

But fundraising for new biological sciences initiatives will likely take the “umbrella campaign” approach involving simulataneous efforts at several schools, Mary Campion, HMS’ dean for resource development, wrote in an e-mail.

Given the campaign’s possible size, Summers will likely be intimately involved. According to Hyman, it is not surprising that Summers would be preparing to hit the fundraising trail so soon.

“There may be campaign fatigue. We have to factor that in,” he wrote. “At the same time, we do have to address pressing needs in this and other areas of the University.”

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.