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When Robert G. Stone Jr. '45, Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation, rose at the annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) to give a "brief but encouraging report" on the University Campaign's progress, he must have had his tongue ever so slightly in his cheek. He would stun his audience a few minutes later with the news that three reunion classes had given a combined total of $81 million and change to the University. (For more on the campaign, see Campaign Checkup) The class of 1932, celebrating its sixty-fifth reunion, contributed $21,712,587. The twentieth-reunion class of 1977 rounded up $28,906,419. But the class of 1952 did even better. For their forty-fifth reunion they set an all-time class-gift record by adding $30,418,512 to Harvard's coffers.
Not that other classes were slouches. The class of 1997 gave $37,431. The twenty-fifth reunioners raised $7,470,890. The fiftieth reunioners raised $10,070,845. Stone noted that the oldest reunioners present, the class of 1927, had set new gift records ever since their twenty-fifth reunion, "and they have kept it up this year": they raised $2,258,007. Other records fell to the class of 1992 ($338,265); the class of 1987 ($1,670,068); the thirty-fifth reunion class of 1962 ($9,074,761); and the class of 1942 ($11,403,478). No wonder the afternoon's featured speaker, Madeleine K. Albright, in her introductory remarks, said that she "would like to solicit the help of this audience for the State Department budget."