In an office on the first floor of University Hall, Associate Dean of Harvard College, Georgene B. Herschbach and her staff wade through millions of dollars of financial requests from divisions within Harvard College. They face decisions like whether to expand staffing at the Office of Career Services or to replace six-year-old computers used by assistants to the House Masters.

Across the Yard, members of the Progressive Student Labor Movement use Mass. Hall as a rallying point to demand that Harvard pay its workers a living wage.

And on the second floor of the Littauer Center for Public Administration, Oliver Hart, Furer professor of economics and chair of the economics department, watches as economics departments at competing universities woo away promising scholars with higher salary offers.

Funding for these initiatives—and the hundreds of others that are considered each year—is hard to come by, even for a University with a $19.2 billion endowment.

Thanks to the fat wallets of Harvard’s benefactors and the incredible economic boom of the 1990s, Harvard’s burgeoning endowment—and not student tuition and fees—has recently become the largest source fueling Harvard’s financial engine.

The University uses no specific formula though for deciding what percentage of the endowment to spend each year. The result, over the past few years, has been that hundreds of millions of dollars theoretically allotted under University policy toward the yearly budget never materialize.

Thus, while Harvard continues to accumulate billions upon billions of dollars of financial reserves, needs within the University continue to go unmet.

Dispersing the Wealth

Harvard made headlines last fall when its endowment reached $19.2 billion—making the University $9 billion richer than any other.

That endowment is the sum of thousands of funds, which are listed in the “Fund and Gift Supplement to the Financial Report”—700 pages of small print that lists every gift from the Lamont Library endowment fund to the Taipei Paper Factory Book fund.

Since most donations are made directly to Harvard’s separate schools, those schools—and not the University’s central administration—actually control the vast majority of the endowment.

But those donations are by no means equal across the University. While the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) controlled $7.99 billion as of June 30, 2000, the Dental School controlled a mere $124 million.