The
University-level leadership of The Harvard Campaign (which was unveiled during
campus events at Memorial Church, Sanders Theatre, and Harvard Stadium on
September 21) includes nine co-chairs and three honorary co-chairs. Each Harvard
school’s campaign, when announced, will have its own leadership—overlapping, in
some cases, with the University cohort introduced here.
Interestingly, three of the nine are members of the Harvard Corporation, the
University’s senior governing board, including
two members elected since it was restructured and expanded in the wake of the
governance reforms introduced in December 2010. Seven of the nine are
professionally involved in financial services or investments.
Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office
Paul J. Finnegan
The co-chairs are:
Paul J. Finnegan ’75, M.B.A. ’82, a former Overseer and
member of the Harvard Corporation since July 1, 2012. Finnegan is co-CEO of Madison
Dearborn Partners, a
Chicago-based private-equity firm that he helped found in 1992, following a
decade at First Chicago Venture Capital; its investments have ranged from the
forest-products industry and financial services to communications and the
recently sold Yankee Candle.
Finnegan was president
of the Harvard Alumni Association (2006-2007), and has been actively involved in Harvard financial
affairs: chairing the Overseers’ committee on finance, administration, and management;
serving on the University financial-management committee from 2009 to 2011, in
the wake of the financial crisis; serving on the Corporation’s finance
committee; and serving as a co-chair of the campaign-planning committee. Tarr
professor of molecular and cellular biology Joshua
Sanes holds the endowed Paul J. Finnegan Family directorship of the Harvard
Center for Brain Science. An
avid undergraduate Nordic skier, Finnegan has also
endowed the Harvard ski team’s coaching position.
Glenn H. Hutchins
Glenn H. Hutchins ’77, J.D.-M.B.A. ’83,
co-founder and former managing director of Silver Lake, a New York-based private-equity firm specializing in
investments in technology companies. Silver Lake led the recent $25-billion
buyout of Dell Inc., the computer firm, and earlier owned Skype, the Internet
telephone company, which it sold in 2011 to Microsoft, the software enterprise
founded by Hutchins’s College classmate Bill Gates, LL.D. ’07, and now run by
classmate Steven A. Ballmer. (For background on Gates’s participation in
the September 21 campaign events, see here; for Walter
Isaacson’s account of Gates’s undergraduate experience, see here.)
Hutchins’s family foundation pledged $30 million to the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences (FAS) last year—part as a challenge fund to jump-start undergraduate
House renewal (one of
FAS’s big-ticket campaign priorities), and part to support
African American studies.
Hutchins is a director of Harvard Management
Company (HMC), which invests the University’s
endowment, and chair of the national advisory board
of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He
is also a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and vice chair of the Brookings Institution’s board of
trustees. He is an owner and member of the
executive committee of the Boston Celtics basketball team as well. A prodigious
fundraiser for his College class and a co-chair of the campaign-planning
committee, Hutchins will co-chair FAS’s capital
campaign (scheduled to be announced in late
October) in addition to his University campaign responsibilities.
Paul A. Maeder, M.B.A. ’84, a co-founder of Highland
Capital Partners, a Cambridge-based venture-capital group (from which he recently stepped down as a
general partner). Maeder served as chair of the National Venture Capital
Association during the 2011-2012 year. A graduate of Princeton, he is described in the CrunchBase database as
involved in advising his alma mater on “initiatives for furthering innovation
in energy and the environment”—areas of expertise in which he also directs
Highland investments.
Interestingly, Maeder is a director and board chair of 2U, an online higher-education enterprise that is exploring some of the same
technological innovations as the Harvard-MIT edX partnership, along with the Stanford-originated,
for-profit companies Coursera and Udacity.
Diana Nelson ’84, a long-time director and now chair of
Carlson, the third generation of family leaders of the privately held company that operates Radisson hotels, TGI Fridays
restaurants, and Carson Wagonlit Travel. As described in her corporate biography,
Nelson is a “passionate and committed fundraiser.” At Harvard, she was the
first woman and youngest person to co-chair the Harvard College Fund. She was
elected to the Board of Overseers in 2010. In that capacity, she has served on the Harvard Corporation’s
committee searching for new candidates for election to that senior governing
board as
its membership has expanded in recent years, and became co-chair (with Joseph O’Donnell) of the
joint Corporation-Overseers committee on alumni affairs and development—created to advance capital-campaign
planning. (Gwill E. York ’79, M.B.A. ’84—see below—is an alumna member of that committee.)
As a member of the dean’s council at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study, Nelson advised and supported Tamara Elliott
Rogers, then associate dean for advancement and planning and since 2007 the
University’s vice president for alumni affairs and development, in which
capacity she is the chief administrative officer directing The Harvard Campaign.
Photograph by Justin Ide/Harvard News Office
Joseph J. O’Donnell
Joseph J. O’Donnell ’67, M.B.A. ’71, a Boston businessman and philanthropist who became
a member of the Harvard Corporation on July 1, 2011. A past
Overseer, member of the University’s “work team” that formulated new
development plans for Allston, and a leading force in Harvard and other
philanthropic activities (see a Harvard Business School video here), O’Donnell has recently been involved in the effort to secure a
casino license for the Suffolk Downs race track site in Boston, where he is a
partner. A baseball fan and 1967 captain of the Crimson team, O’Donnell was a
bidder when the Boston Red Sox were sold in 2001—an opportunity that combined his interest in the
sport and in the stadium food concessions business (see this profile).
Reflecting his endowment gift for the post in 1995, the position of Harvard’s baseball
coach bears his name. The
baseball venue was named O’Donnell Field in 1997. Daughter Kate O’Donnell graduated from Harvard in the class of
2009; her sister,
Casey O’Donnell, graduated in the College class of
2011. A co-chair of the campaign-planning committee (with Finnegan and
Hutchins), O’Donnell and his
wife, Katherine A. O’Donnell, gave the University $30 million in early 2012—a gift they said they hoped “will encourage others to do the same.” All four O’Donnells were recognized in the
September 7 rededication of Stone Hall, the renovated Old Quincy undergraduate residence, for supporting the
project.
Lisbet Rausing,
Ph.D. ’93, a historian of science and philanthropist, founded the Arcadia Fund (formerly the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund) in 2001;
the United Kingdom-based foundation’s grants are focused on protecting
“endangered culture and nature”—including near-extinct languages, historical
archives, and threatened ecosystems. Among the grants listed by Arcadia are funding
for Harvard researchers to study environmental data captured in glacial ice; support through the
Berkman Center to advance the work of the Digital Public Library of America; and a $5-million grant to the Harvard Library (one of a series of such grants to universities) for
collection-building, archival cataloging, and conservation of archival collections. A separate $5-million grant supported Harvard Library’s fledgling online operations. Rausing and her husband, Peter Baldwin, Ph.D. ’86, in 2011 gave
Yale (Baldwin’s alma mater) $25 million to create the Yale Institute for the
Preservation of Cultural Heritage, a central clearinghouse for museum and library conservation
science and practice located on that university’s new satellite West Campus.
Rausing was an assistant professor of the history of science, and then an associate of the department, from 1994 through 2003. Her grandfather pioneered Tetra
Pak, the privately held,
Swedish and Swiss food-packaging company (think: milk and juice cartons) that
is now the world’s largest. In 2005, she was elected to the Board of Overseers.
Photograph by Jon Chase/Harvard News Office
James F. Rothenberg
James F. Rothenberg ’68, M.B.A. ’70, member of the Harvard Corporation and University
treasurer since 2004, chairman of Harvard Management Company’s board of
directors (on which Hutchins serves), and co-chair of the campaign-planning
group (with Finnegan, Hutchins, and O’Donnell). He is chairman and director of Capital Research and
Management Company, the
privately held, Los Angeles-based investment firm, which most recently reported
more than $1.1 trillion under management. He is also a trustee
of Caltech.
As treasurer and HMC chair, Rothenberg
has often set the tone for the University’s financial outlook, published in the
annual financial report; of
late, he has been cautious, even wary, about current external challenges.
Among gifts to Harvard, he has endowed the
chair held by Diana Sorensen, Rothenberg professor of Romance languages and
literatures and of comparative literature, and dean of arts and humanities. At the September 7 dedication of the
renovated “Old Quincy” in honor of the Corporation’s late Senior Fellow Robert
G. Stone Jr., Rothenberg
was cited for “a truly extraordinary and selfless gift” in support of this
initial House renewal project. He has been active in campaign-related fundraising in the
United States and internationally.
© Monika Flueckiger/World Economic Forum, swiss-image.ch/CC-BY-SA-2.0
David M. Rubenstein
David M. Rubenstein, Parent ’07, ’10,
co-founder and co-chief executive officer of The Carlyle Group, based in
Washington, D.C. Carlyle, now publicly
traded, is an investment firm focused on private equity, real estate, and other
assets; it manages some $180 billion in diverse funds. Rubenstein, a graduate
of Duke and the University of Chicago Law School, practiced law privately and
served as a U.S. Senate staff member and deputy assistant to the president
during the Carter administration. He co-founded his current firm in 1987. Among
his civic engagements, he is chair of the Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts; a Smithsonian Institution regent; chair of Duke’s board
of trustees; and
vice chair of the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution (as is Glenn
Hutchins) and of the Council
on Foreign Relations board of directors. He has also been a trustee of the University of Chicago and a
lead board member of New York’s Lincoln Center.
Rubenstein knows the
University in part as the father of Alexandra Nicole Rubenstein ’07 and Gabrielle
W. Rubenstein ’10, and as a member of the dean’s advisory council for Harvard
Business School, where his wife, Alice Rogoff Rubenstein, earned her M.B.A. in
1978.
He has been a supporter of the Harvard Kennedy School, donating $10 million in
September 2004, and $5
million in 2008 for fellowships for students enrolled in the Kennedy
School-Business School joint-degree program. For a discussion of Rubenstein’s
broader philanthropic activities, see the separate background report on his
September 21 Harvard Campaign launch conversation with Bill Gates.
Gwill E. York ’79, M.B.A. ’84, co-founder and managing
director of Lighthouse Capital Partners, a “venture-debt” financing firm; she is particularly focused on
life-sciences investments, and works from the firm’s Cambridge office.
According to her Harvard Business School biography (she served as an “entrepreneur in residence” part-time at the Arthur Rock Center for
Entrepreneurship during the 2010-2011 academic year), York has been involved
with advisory boards for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the
Medical School’s systems biology department, and the Rock Center itself. She
also serves on the boards of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Brigham
and Women’s Hospital.
She was elected to the Board of Overseers last summer. York is also a member of the Corporation-Overseer joint
committee on alumni affairs and development, co-chaired by Joseph O’Donnell and Diana
Nelson, and, as a co-chair of the Harvard College Fund
executive committee, was a participant in the groundbreaking for the Old Quincy
renovation, the first stage of undergraduate House renewal.
Photograph by Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office
Gustave Hauser
Photograph by Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office
Rita Hauser
The honorary co-chairs are:
Gustave Hauser, LL.B. ’53, and Rita Hauser, L ’58, in 2011 made the $40-million gift that established
the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching—anchoring a core priority of The Harvard Campaign.
Among other results of their local philanthropy, Harvard Law School’s Hauser
Hall, built in the mid 1990s to provide much-needed
faculty offices, bears its benefactors’ name. Similarly, the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, based at the
Kennedy School, was launched with their support in 1997. Rita Hauser was recognized with a Harvard
Medal at Commencement in 1999; her citation read, “Caring deeply
about education, the world of nonprofits, and Harvard University, you are a
dynamic inspiration to us all, conscious of the need to challenge and to lead.”
The couple have also endowed the directorship of the University’s human-rights
committee, and a professorship of human rights and humanitarian law. Rita
Hauser was a national chair of the University Campaign, which ran from 1994 to
1999.
Sidney Knafel ’52, M.B.A.
’54, was a national campaign chair for the University Campaign. The Knafel
building of Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies bears his name. He also endowed the
Knafel professorship of music, held by Thomas Forrest Kelly. Upon Neil L. Rudenstine’s
retirement as Harvard president in 2001, Knafel wrote about the experience of
working with him on
academic and campaign planning. He was awarded
a Harvard Medal in 2006; the
citation noted that his “enduring commitment to education and to Harvard has
built a lasting legacy for our scholars and students, enabling them to make a
difference in the world and a world of difference.”
This past spring, Knafel created a $10.5-million fund to support the
Radcliffe Institute; the former Radcliffe gymnasium, now renovated as
a conference center, was renamed in his honor—and he has signed up, again, as
co-chair of the Radcliffe Campaign, which will go public later this autumn.