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Harvard Plans for Capital Campaign

Campaign could be largest ever in higher education

And the University had already committed money to a spate of smaller initiatives, with more on the way.

An increased commitment to public service would also be a focus of the campaign. Summers has created a three-year, $15 million graduate student financial aid program to support graduate studies in low-income fields.

The lynchpin of the campaign will likely be the University’s new campus in Allston. The planning and construction of the campus across the river—where Harvard owns more land than it does in Cambridge—will cost billions of dollars, as the center of the University is moved from the John Harvard statue to the Charles River.

Summers’ current plan for the new campus would create a science nexus, including many of his major initiatives, move the Graduate School of Education and the School of Public Health and add housing—graduate housing and possibly new or relocated undergraduate Houses.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent to acquire and begin clearing land across the river, and billions more will likely be required to prepare the land and begin construction of the first parts of the new campus, which could happen as soon as five years from now.

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So far, most of the Allston expenses have been covered by a five-year tax levied on the schools’ endowments. That tax was just extended to 25 years to defray future costs.

But as expenses begin to soar with groundbreaking on the horizon, more money will be needed to fund the University’s expansion.

PLANNING THE CAMPAIGN

Rapier says the administration has been considering a campaign for the last year, when the idea was first raised with senior development and central administration officials.

But she adds that these administrators feel more ready to launch a campaign now that academic and physical planning across the University is further advanced. Committees on both Allston and the curricular review will release preliminary conclusions this spring, and the University is narrowing the search for a firm to plan its Allston campus.

Allston is figuring prominently into the still unresolved question of the length of this campaign.

Campaigns tend to be seven years, although the University is considering a 10-year campaign that would extend further into Allston construction and thus more substantially offset Allston costs. The other option, Rapier says, is to hold a seven-year campaign now and another one as Allston work progresses.

Although the effects of the recent recession on giving have weighed on the minds of development officers, the economy does not generally have a major impact on education donations, according to John Taylor, vice president for research and data services at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, a Washington-based advocacy group that tracks higher education fundraising.

“Education in general and higher education in specific seems to be very resilient when it comes to fundraising campaigns,” Taylor says. “The economy doesn’t seem to have a substantial dampening effect.”

With the economy now on an upswing, the time is ripe to kickoff a campaign, he says.

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