Dive Brief:
- Harvard received its largest single donation ever from wealthy hedge fund manager John Paulson.
- The New York Times reports that the Harvard Business School grad gave $400 million to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which will be renamed for him in honor of his gift.
- The engineering school is in the middle of an expansion across the Charles River from Cambridge to Allston, MA, where a new science campus is being built to support rapid programming increases by the school, according to the article.
Dive Insight:
Paulson’s donation further increases the endowment of the wealthiest university in the world. Harvard’s endowment already tops $32 billion, about one-third more than the endowment of its closest competitor for wealth, Yale. Harvard has been able to amass this fortune in part because it has been around so long — it was founded in the early 1600s, about 140 years before the United States even won independence from Britain. The New York Times reports that Paulson’s donation helps Harvard with its $6.5 billion fundraising campaign, though his gift has been roundly criticized by those who thought it would have been better spent helping the poor.