As a recession tightens its grip on New England, the University's long-awaited multi-billion dollar fundraising effort faces a future marked with uncertainty.

At one time primed to kick off next fall, the fund drive was pushed back a year, primarily due to the ongoing search for a new president. Now, worsening economic conditions throughout the nation threaten to further delay the fund drive.

According to one Harvard administrator, who requested anonymity, an extended recession would make an already ambitious undertaking--higher education's largest ever--all the more difficult to achieve.

Yet Vice President for Finance Robert H. Scott says he thinks the economic malaise will have little effect on Harvard's proposed fundraising effort.

"Most fund drives have some great years and some less-great years," Scott says. In multi-year fundraising efforts, he says, the economy will have its ups and downs. The current economic problems may already be gone by the time Harvard embarks on its drive, Scott adds.

Still, some analysts say economic pressures, at least in the foreseeable future, are here to stay. At the New York-based Council for Aid to Education, which monitors higher education fundraising efforts, Vice President and Treasurer Robert M. Jordan says the small giver, in particular, may be discouraged by the recession.

"All other things being equal, people are feeling their jobs are at risk," Jordan says. "Yes, it does hurt."

But beyond individual responses, the recession will be less likely to affect the giving attitudes of the major capital funders, those who give in the millions of dollars, Jordan says.

Comparing Notes

Looking at other schools and their current campaigns, Scott says he is encouraged. For instance, the vice president says fundraising at his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has not been stunted significantly by the economic environment.

MIT, Scott notes, announced its fund drive on the day the stock market crashed in 1987, and "they have done very well" in their efforts.

"I think that's the most dramatic example there is," Scott says. MIT is $556 million along the way to their goal of $700 million, according to Glenn P. Strekle, vice president and treasurer for the school.

And at Cornell, where a $1.25 billion campaign was launched last October, fundraising officer David R. Dunlop agrees with Scott's assessments.

"We launched our campaign realizing that the economy was not strong," Dunlop says. "In any six or seven-year cycle there are going to be economic upturns and downturns."

The five-year Cornell effort, currently standing at $424 million, is "a little bit ahead of schedule," Dunlop says.