Older endowed professorships which have become difficult to fill over the years include the Hollis Chair of Mathematick and Natural Philosophy and the Fisher Professorship of Natural History, charged with studying "animal, mineral and vegetable" in the 1700s.

These professorships and scholarships, even when outdated, are not always as easily changed as the Zalaznick chair of Holocaust Studies was last week.

After an abortive search for a scholar to fill that chair, Harvard successfully encouraged the endowing family to divert the money to a Medical School project for the time being.

University Attorney Frank J. Connors says when the gifts become outdated, Harvard must sometimes resort to legal recourse to rechannel the funds. It usually means a court appearance known as a Cy Pres hearing.

"In effect, Cy Pres means you can change the terms of the gift if they become impractical or illegal," Connors says. "But you can change it only so much as to make it practical or legal [still adhering] to the terms of the gift."

For example, money allotted for polio research was rerouted to other medical research in the early 1960s after a vaccine for polio was found.

An Ounce of Prevention

When today's donors have their own unique interests, the task of soliciting large donations sometimes means dissuading donors from less-than-useful gifts.

"Our fundraisers are pretty good at talking people out of strange things nowadays," says Paul W. Upson, assistant dean for finance and operations at the Law School.

"It's a very interesting dance to try and match the donor's dreams with the institution's dreams," says Radcliffe's Vice President for College Relations Bonnie Clendenning. "The institution's dreams are often severely constrained by tradition, legal issues and allocation of scarce resources, versus a donor's interests which are often very single-minded."

Andy K. Tiedemann, director of communications in Harvard's development office, says the University usually receives large gifts after extended consultation between the donor and Harvard officials--consultation that usually prevents the donor from sticking to an impractical idea.

"The general expectation is that donors will come to us with an original idea, and if the idea doesn't match the goals of the University, most donors will modify their original plan," Tiedemann says.

Officials say that on rare occasions, donors will not budge from a gift idea that Harvard simply cannot use. In such cases, the University must turn the gift down.

While officials could provide no recent examples of Harvard turning down an impractical gift, Yale University recently refused a gift of $20 million to endow a program in Western Civilization.

However, bequests are another story. Often the school will not learn of the gift until the donor has died, leaving little time for negotiation. One gift left to Radcliffe, for example, was a piece of jewelry that came with the stipulation that it must be worn by the president of Radcliffe.