"Prince Turki bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, of Saudi Arabia, endowed a professorship of immunology at Harvard Medical School In October 1990. The amount of the gift was not disclosed, but it usually costs about $2 million to endow a full professorship.

"The Association Francois-Xavier Bagnoud, a Swiss charitable foundation, endowed a new building, center and professorship for the study of health and human right at the Harvard School of Public Health. The gift, announced In December 1992, totaled $20 million.

"Werner Otto, a German mail-order magnate, was the principal donor for the $7.5 million Werner Otto Hall, which houses the Bush-Reisinger Museum and the Fine Arts Library in an addition to the Fogg Art Museum. The building opened in September 1991.

"King Fahd bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, of Saudi Arabia, gave Harvard $5 million to support the study of Islamic law. The donation, announced last month, will endow a professorship and fund legal research.

Not all of these gifts will count toward the $2 billion capital campaign. But they represent a trend that Harvard fundraisers undoubtedly hope will continue.

Necessity

Indeed, given the increasingly global distribution of wealth, the case can be made that international fundraising must be successful it Harvard is to reach its $2 billion goal.

Scan a list of the world's 101 riches people (one such list was recently published in Fortune magazine), and only about one quarter of them are U.S. residents, Japan, Hong Kong, Great Britain, Mexico, Germany and Switzerland are all competitive repositories of wealth and they're gaining.

Harvard fundraising traditionally relies on alumni donors, most of them American Citizens. No statistics were available on Harvard's current stream of international cash.

But a federal law re-instead last summer requires colleges and Universities to report to the U.S. secretary of education all gifts of more than $250,000 from foreign countries, people or corporations.

Universities must also report any restrictions or conditions of the gift.

Such reporting requirements came about in part because of concern in Congress and elsewhere that foreign governments were in a position to take advantage of United States universities.

Pearl Harbor?

The issue drew national press attention in December 1991 with the release of a report from the Washington-based Center for public Integrity. The study was alarmingly titled "Buying the American Mind: Japan's Quest for U.S. Ideas in Science, Economic Policy and the Schools," and was released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The report sad the Japanese get "obvious benefits" for their money, including "direct access to university science findings, influence over what some U.S. students learn about Japan, and distribution of public policy view that coincide with their own."