Fonda Cuts Major Ed. School Gift

Citing financial difficulties and a new, more restrictive policy on academic centers, the Graduate School of Education (GSE) announced last week that actress Jane Fonda will not be donating most of the $12.5 million she pledged two years ago for the creation of a gender studies center.

Fonda’s pledge—which would have been the GSE’s largest in its 83-year-history—was slated to endow a center with $2.5 million earmarked for the center’s chair, a position named for famed gender studies expert and former Graham professor of gender studies Carol Gilligan.

In an October interview, Gilligan said that the funding would make it possible for Harvard to legitimize gender studies once and for all and to “take leadership internationally on these issues.”

Fonda gave the GSE $6.5 million at the time of her pledge, a large part of which was earmarked for the chair. But this summer, when nothing had been made of her donation, the actress was reportedly angry and considering withholding the rest of her donation, according to a Boston Globe columnist.

According to Thursday’s announcement, Fonda will indeed not be donating the additional $6 million.

Even the unused portion of the money that Fonda has already given will be returned to the actress.

The University is calling the change in this agreement with Fonda a mutual decision between Fonda and the GSE.

The small portion of the Fonda funds which the GSE still plans to use will be channeled into the Boston chapter of the Big Sisters foundation and Project ASSERT, a program to increase awareness of gender, race and class issues among educators.

Center Policy Changes

Since the time of Fonda’s donation, Harvard has installed a new president and the GSE has named a new dean, each of whom brought new visions. The University has also created a new, much more restrictive policy on centers.

Last week’s announcement cited the University’s new policy on centers as part of the reasoning behind abandoning the Gender Studies Center.

“Several factors, including the prolonged slump in the stock market as well as new University rules regarding research centers led to a change of terms,” stated the press release.

Early this December, deans and University President Lawrence H. Summers approved a policy requiring that each new center have an explicit mission statement that supplements the work of individual departments.

“We want to make sure that these add-ons don’t actually take resources away from the core mission of the schools,” said University Provost Steven E. Hyman, at the time of the policy’s approval.

At that time, Hyman spoke of the problems that often arise when centers lose a leader.

“A center often begins with a set of problems and often an entrepreneurial or charismatic leader and a donor,” Hyman said at the time. “What may happen years down the road when the leader has moved on is that the center may languish and may lack strong regular faculty leadership.”

In a June, 2002 Boston Globe article about Fonda’s anger at the lack of progress in finding a leader for the gender center, though, Hyman was quoted saying that he had reassured Fonda that the center would happen.

“My job was to explain the pace of the University to her, and although it may seem frustrating, that the goal is to find superb people for her center,” Hyman said in June. “I hope that Jane Fonda gives us a chance to get everyone in place.”

Economic Woes

Haas cited the slow economy as the main reason for the gender center’s rollback.

“The primary reason is the downturn of the economy, which affected both the GSE and Ms. Fonda,” Haas said.

According to an interview with Gilligan this fall, Fonda was particularly reluctant to give the GSE more money because the movie star and former wife of media mogul Ted Turner had lost so much money due to heavy investment in sagging AOL Time Warner stocks.

At the time her marriage to Turner in 1991, Fonda received millions of dollars worth of stock in Turner Broadcasting, a company that merged with Time Warner and then with AOL in 2001.

At the time of her donation, a mere year after the much-celebrated merger of AOL and Time Warner, the stocks looked hopeful.

But the company has taken record losses—to the tune of $100 billion in the past year—and stock that was worth about $50 a share in April of 2001, when Fonda gave the gift, is now worth about $12 a share.

Neither Gilligan nor Fonda could be reached for comment over the weekend.

What Remains

Although there will be no gender center and no Gilligan chair, Fonda’s money has been used to fund two GSE initiatives, including project ASSERT.

According to Associate Professor of Education Wendy L. Luttrell, who heads Project ASSERT, Fonda donated $500,000 to the program and will provided “continued support,” but Luttrell declined to specify how much.

It remains unclear exactly what factors led Fonda to withdraw the bulk of donation, but plans for the center and for filling the chair were moving slower than planned.

Former GSE Dean Jerome T. Murphy said at the time Fonda announced her $12.5 billion pledge that he hoped to fill Gilligan’s chair by this school year—but the position, rejected by University of California Professor of Anthropology Emerita Sarah B. Hrdy, has remained vacant.

For two years, the GSE has had three empty chairs in gender studies—a junior chair, the chair Fonda donated, and the chair Gilligan vacated.

Gilligan departed Harvard to become a university professor at New York University in June 2002, a move she announced the same day Fonda pledged her donation to GSE in Gilligan’s honor.

Donation Inspiration

Fonda, a well-known activist who led an anti-teen pregnancy campaign in Georgia and traveled to Vietnam to promote peace, said she first encountered Gilligan’s work—the ultimate inspiration for her donation—when writer Gloria Steinem gave her a copy of In a Different Voice, Gilligan’s book on female psychology.

At the time of the 2001 donation announcement, Fonda called the gift a “thank-you” to Gilligan for helping her recognize the “toxic” effect of gender roles.

Gilligan taught at Harvard for more than 20 years and held the University’s first endowed chair for gender studies.

Through her studies of human development, Gilligan offered new ideas of male and female psychology which questioned existing views that held women to be less developed in their moral sense than men.

But Gilligan’s departure—and the vacancies in both her Graham professorship and the chair in her name—left GSE without the leadership in gender studies that it once had.

In fact, among the 15 people GSE lists with gender studies as a research interest, not one is currently a full professor except for GSE Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann herself.

Lagemann could not be reached for comment over the weekend.

Gilligan has repeatedly said that she never felt free to leave Harvard until the Fonda donation created a mandate for future work in gender studies.

“When Harvard takes a step, a path opens,” Gilligan said in October. “What’s important is not to dribble away these resources.”

—Lauren R. Dorgan, Claire A. Pasternack and Elisabeth S. Theodore contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt can be reached at steinhar@fas.harvard.edu.