Film star Jane Fonda has given $12.5 million to endow a Graduate School of Education (GSE) center to study how gender affects children's development and learning, GSE officials announced Friday.

Fonda's gift--by far the largest donation GSE has received in its 80-year history--gives $2.5 million to endow a new chair named after famed gender studies expert and Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, who announced Friday that she will leave the University in June 2002.

Gilligan said she decided to leave as soon as Fonda gave money to found the gender and education center.

"I felt for many years, I was so committed to this work and bringing it to this point," Gilligan said. "My realization that [the research] will broaden and expand--it frees me to leave."

Gilligan, the Graham professor of gender studies, said becoming a university professor at New York University would offer her "the breadth I need" to continue teaching and writing.

Fonda, who led an anti-pregnancy campaign in Georgia and ran a children's camp in California, has been known for her activism but only recently has turned to gender issues.

"Through my work with nonprofits, I've been frustrated by how the best intentioned programs have been stymied because they don't take gender into account," she said in an interview.

She called her donation a "thank-you" gift to Gilligan, who has taught at Harvard for more than 30 years and whom Fonda said made her realize the "toxic" effect of gender roles.

Known for her work in human development, Gilligan proposed new concepts of male and female psychology that challenged existing views of women as less psychologically developed than men. In 1997, the University created its first endowed chair for gender studies and appointed Gilligan to it.

David A.J. Richards, a professor of law at NYU Law School who has co-taught a seminar with Gilligan for the last three years, said Gilligan became "unhappy" with her position at Harvard because she could not move freely between disciplines.

"She feels a creative bottleneck. She felt she did as much as she could for the place," he said. "She has her own interests."

Richards said the seminar he teaches with Gilligan allows greater freedom. For instance, he said, the law students work with actors and directors to learn about gender in Shakespeare. Though the seminar is devoted to issues of women's "moral voice," the students also take voice lessons to learn about the physical aspects of voice, he added.

Gilligan, who is also a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, will wrap up both assignments at the end of next year and will leave for NYU.

The new Center for Gender and Education will not replace existing GSE initiatives on gender issues, according to GSE Dean Jerome T. Murphy.

But Murphy said the center will "extend and integrate" initiatives such as the Risk and Prevention Program, which focuses on early intervention for at-risk children, and the Urban Superintendents Program.

In addition to sponsoring academic research, Murphy said the center will work on current educational issues, recommending curriculum changes to help boys and girls and giving seminars for classroom teachers on how to work with boys and girls.

Murphy said he will form a search committee this spring to fill the new endowed chair in Gilligan's name. He said a candidate should be found in time for the 2002-03 academic year.

Fonda's gift follows a speech she delivered last year calling for the GSE to establish a comprehensive program to study why boys and girls develop differently.

Fonda said she first learned of Gilligan's work in 1985, when feminist writer Gloria Steinem gave her a copy of In a Different Voice, a celebrated book on female psychology.

But only in the last couple of years, Fonda said at a press conference, did she come "to understand the effect that gender roles have had on me."

"Everywhere I go, gender norms impact the healthy development of young people," she added.

In an interview, Fonda said she blames the expectations on men and women for many hardships, such as her own eating disorders, her father's unhappiness and her mother's suicide.

She acknowledged that talk of "internalizing gender norms" could seem odd for a woman who starred as the sexy heroine in 1968's futuristic movie Barbarella.

But now, Fonda said, she could look back on the experience and realize how expectations of being a "perfect girl" had been "toxic to my heart."

"I could make that same movie today and see it as a feminist movie," she added.