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July-August 2008
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A Giant's GiftDavid Rockefeller ’36, G ’37, LL.D. ’69, has made a $100-million gift to Harvard, the largest by an alumnus in University history. Reflecting the convergence of his own lifelong interests and current Harvard priorities, the gift will support two broad initiatives. The first is international experiences for students—in particular, aiding undergraduates venturing abroad, and underwriting innovative faculty-developed classroom and other programs with an international component. Rockefeller has designated $70 million for these purposes. The second is the arts—particularly engagement with visual arts, in the form of the Harvard Art Museum’s new study centers that will be created during the wholesale remaking of the Fogg complex. Some $30 million is devoted to this project and related arts programming, as a task force appointed by President Drew Faust explores the place of the arts in the curriculum and across the institution. (On the Fogg renovation, a multihundred-million-dollar renovation expected to begin in 2009, see "Open Access to Art," and “Art of the Future?” May-June, page 60; for the task force’s mission, see “Approaching the Arts Anew,” January-February, page 59.) 
Photograph by Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office David Rockefeller The gift was announced on April 25, in time for a dinner meeting of the Committee on University Resources—Harvard’s leading philanthropic supporters and fundraising volunteers. It also coincided with pre-frosh weekend, when students admitted to the class of 2012 visited campus before deciding what college to attend; news of added funding for international travel and the arts could hardly be discouraging. In the news release announcing the gift, Rockefeller said, “Harvard opened my eyes and my mind to the world.…Harvard provided me with an intellectual framework to understand what I was seeing and experiencing that has stayed with me for my entire life.…I hope my gift will help enable future Harvard undergraduates to experience similar opportunities to learn about the world in which they live.” Faust praised Rockefeller for a “magnificent act of generosity from an extraordinary friend of Harvard.…Harvard has had occasion to thank David Rockefeller many times before, but never more so than today, for his profound commitment to learning experiences that hold the promise to transform people’s lives.” The news release also noted that Rockefeller has previously given $40 million in gifts to Harvard, including $25 million to create the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS, www.drclas.harvard.edu; he provided the initial grant in 1994 and, most recently, another $10 million in May 2006). The former chairman, president, and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank and chairman of the Rockefeller Group served on Harvard’s Board of Overseers from 1954 to 1966, and as the board’s president from 1966 to 1968. Faust welcomed Rockefeller to Massachusetts Hall late that afternoon, noting “just how much it means to have David devoted to this institution for such a long time.” In a brief conversation, he recalled the genesis of his support for the Latin American center in a luncheon conversation with Neil L. Rudenstine, Harvard’s then newly appointed president, in which they concurred that it was “rather shocking” the University had done so little scholarly work on the region. They agreed to create the center and, Rockefeller said, “I’m awfully glad we did,” citing its “astonishing” progress. He attributed its programmatic growth—for example, in providing student experiences abroad—to the involvement of “excellent people” on campus and in the center’s Latin American offices. Faust noted that the discretionary innovation funds Rockefeller is providing would enable her to work with faculties across the University, many of them already engaged around the world, to see “what kinds of undergraduate opportunities could be built in” to their programs—for which he expressed great enthusiasm. The arts, he said, are “another area of special interest to me,” dating from his childhood. As an undergraduate, he noted, he spent much time at the Fogg; its director, Paul Sachs, played a vital role in his mother’s creation and staffing of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
As Rockefeller explained in his Memoirs (2002), his engagements with Harvard, with the world, and with art have been constant themes throughout his life. “Mother strongly influenced my choice of colleges,” he wrote. “[She]…wanted one of us to go to Harvard,” the school of her favorite brother, Winthrop Aldrich, A.B. 1907, LL.B. 1910. “I was her last hope”—a hope fulfilled when he enrolled in 1932. By that time, he had seen more of the world than most Americans, including a 1927 trip to France and a 1929 family journey to the Middle East. During the summer following his freshman year, Rockefeller studied abroad, living in Munich to master German (one of the two modern languages he needed to fulfill Harvard requirements at the time)—and so got his first glimpse of Nazism. His host family took him on weekend outings to study Bavarian art and architecture, further developing an interest already influenced by his father’s collections and his mother’s role in founding MoMA. In the book, Rockefeller devoted one chapter to “my lifetime pursuits as an internationalist” (“globalization” had not yet joined the popular vocabulary), and another to his lifelong involvement in the world “South of the Border.” That exposure, he wrote, has ranged from a second honeymoon in Mexico in 1946 to high-level work as a banker and policymaker promoting economic development and cultural interchanges as Latin America experienced decades of political turmoil and debt-fueled growth and financial upheaval, followed by democratization and private-sector expansion, and today’s uncertain prospects. He also examined the region through the lens of brother Nelson’s “Good Neighbor”programs (at the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt) and fellow Overseer John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. His own work with intermediary institutions has extended from recommending new economic strategies that local governments might adopt, to helping introduce Americans to “the diversity, beauty, and sophistication of Latin American artists, musicians, and writers” (for example, subsidizing the English translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude). 1 | 2 | continued >  
 
 
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