The Campaign Co-Chairs

Harvard’s fundraising leaders

The University-level leadership of The Harvard Campaign (which was unveiled during campus events at Memorial Church, Sanders Theatre, and Harvard Stadium on September 21) includes nine co-chairs and three honorary co-chairs. Each Harvard school’s campaign, when announced, will have its own leadership—overlapping, in some cases, with the University cohort introduced here. Updated September 22, 11:30 a.m., to show the school campaign leadership positions also held by University campaign co-chairs Paul A. Maeder and David M. Rubenstein, below.

Interestingly, three of the nine are members of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s senior governing board, including two members elected since it was restructured and expanded in the wake of the governance reforms introduced in December 2010. Seven of the nine are professionally involved in financial services or investments.

Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office

Paul J. Finnegan

The co-chairs are:    
Paul J. Finnegan ’75, M.B.A. ’82, a former Overseer and member of the Harvard Corporation since July 1, 2012. Finnegan is co-CEO of Madison Dearborn Partners, a Chicago-based private-equity firm that he helped found in 1992, following a decade at First Chicago Venture Capital; its investments have ranged from the forest-products industry and financial services to communications and the recently sold Yankee Candle.

Finnegan was president of the Harvard Alumni Association (2006-2007), and has been actively involved in Harvard financial affairs: chairing the Overseers’ committee on finance, administration, and management; serving on the University financial-management committee from 2009 to 2011, in the wake of the financial crisis; serving on the Corporation’s finance committee; and serving as a co-chair of the campaign-planning committee. Tarr professor of molecular and cellular biology Joshua Sanes holds the endowed Paul J. Finnegan Family directorship of the Harvard Center for Brain Science. An avid undergraduate Nordic skier, Finnegan has also endowed the Harvard ski team’s coaching position.

 

Glenn H. Hutchins

Glenn H. Hutchins ’77, J.D.-M.B.A. ’83, co-founder and former managing director of Silver Lake, a New York-based private-equity firm specializing in investments in technology companies. Silver Lake led the recent $25-billion buyout of Dell Inc., the computer firm, and earlier owned Skype, the Internet telephone company, which it sold in 2011 to Microsoft, the software enterprise founded by Hutchins’s College classmate Bill Gates, LL.D. ’07, and now run by classmate Steven A. Ballmer. (For background on Gates’s participation in the September 21 campaign events, see here; for Walter Isaacson’s account of Gates’s undergraduate experience, see here.)

Hutchins’s family foundation pledged $30 million to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) last year—part as a challenge fund to jump-start undergraduate House renewal (one of FAS’s big-ticket campaign priorities), and part to support African American studies.

Hutchins is a director of Harvard Management Company (HMC), which invests the University’s endowment, and chair of the national advisory board of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is also a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and vice chair of the Brookings Institution’s board of trustees. He is an owner and member of the executive committee of the Boston Celtics basketball team as well. A prodigious fundraiser for his College class and a co-chair of the campaign-planning committee, Hutchins will co-chair FAS’s capital campaign (scheduled to be announced in late October) in addition to his University campaign responsibilities.

Paul A. Maeder, M.B.A. ’84, a co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, a Cambridge-based venture-capital group (from which he recently stepped down as a general partner). Maeder served as chair of the National Venture Capital Association during the 2011-2012 year. A graduate of Princeton, he is described in the CrunchBase database as involved in advising his alma mater on “initiatives for furthering innovation in energy and the environment”—areas of expertise in which he also directs Highland investments.

Interestingly, Maeder is a director and board chair of 2U, an online higher-education enterprise that is exploring some of the same technological innovations as the Harvard-MIT edX partnership, along with the Stanford-originated, for-profit companies Coursera and Udacity. Maeder also co-chairs the campaign for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, with former Corporation member Herbert S. Winokur Jr., '65, Ph.D. '67.

Diana Nelson ’84, a long-time director and now chair of Carlson, the third generation of family leaders of the privately held company that operates Radisson hotels, TGI Fridays restaurants, and Carson Wagonlit Travel. As described in her corporate biography, Nelson is a “passionate and committed fundraiser.” At Harvard, she was the first woman and youngest person to co-chair the Harvard College Fund. She was elected to the Board of Overseers in 2010. In that capacity, she has served on the Harvard Corporation’s committee searching for new candidates for election to that senior governing board as its membership has expanded in recent years, and became co-chair (with Joseph O’Donnell) of the joint Corporation-Overseers committee on alumni affairs and development—created to advance capital-campaign planning. (Gwill E. York ’79, M.B.A. ’84—see  below—is an alumna member of that committee.)

As a member of the dean’s council at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Nelson advised and supported Tamara Elliott Rogers, then associate dean for advancement and planning and since 2007 the University’s vice president for alumni affairs and development, in which capacity she is the chief administrative officer directing The Harvard Campaign.

Photograph by Justin Ide/Harvard News Office

Joseph J. O'Donnell

Joseph J. O’Donnell ’67, M.B.A. ’71, a Boston businessman and philanthropist who became a member of the Harvard Corporation on July 1, 2011. A past Overseer, member of the University’s “work team” that formulated new development plans for Allston, and a leading force in Harvard and other philanthropic activities (see a Harvard Business School video here), O’Donnell has recently been involved in the effort to secure a casino license for the Suffolk Downs race track site in Boston, where he is a partner. A baseball fan and 1967 captain of the Crimson team, O’Donnell was a bidder when the Boston Red Sox were sold in 2001—an opportunity that combined his interest in the sport and in the stadium food concessions business (see this profile).

Reflecting his endowment gift for the post in 1995, the position of Harvard’s baseball coach bears his name. The baseball venue was named O’Donnell Field in 1997. Daughter Kate O’Donnell graduated from Harvard in the class of 2009; her sister, Casey O’Donnell, graduated in the College class of 2011. A co-chair of the campaign-planning committee (with Finnegan and Hutchins), O’Donnell and his wife, Katherine A. O’Donnell, gave the University $30 million in early 2012—a gift they said they hoped “will encourage others to do the same.” All four O’Donnells were recognized in the September 7 rededication of Stone Hall, the renovated Old Quincy undergraduate residence, for supporting the project.

Lisbet Rausing, Ph.D. ’93, a historian of science and philanthropist, founded the Arcadia Fund (formerly the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund) in 2001; the United Kingdom-based foundation’s grants are focused on protecting “endangered culture and nature”—including near-extinct languages, historical archives, and threatened ecosystems. Among the grants listed by Arcadia are funding for Harvard researchers to study environmental data captured in glacial ice; support through the Berkman Center to advance the work of the Digital Public Library of America; and a $5-million grant to the Harvard Library (one of a series of such grants to universities) for collection-building, archival cataloging, and conservation of archival collections. A separate $5-million grant supported Harvard Library’s fledgling online operations. Rausing and her husband, Peter Baldwin, Ph.D. ’86, in 2011 gave Yale (Baldwin’s alma mater) $25 million to create the Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, a central clearinghouse for museum and library conservation science and practice located on that university’s new satellite West Campus.

Rausing was an assistant professor of the history of science, and then an associate of the department, from 1994 through 2003. Her grandfather pioneered Tetra Pak, the privately held, Swedish and Swiss food-packaging company (think: milk and juice cartons) that is now the world’s largest. In 2005, she was elected to the Board of Overseers.

Photograph by Jon Chase/Harvard News Office

James F. Rothenberg

James F. Rothenberg ’68, M.B.A. ’70, member of the Harvard Corporation and University treasurer since 2004, chairman of Harvard Management Company’s board of directors (on which Hutchins serves), and co-chair of the campaign-planning group (with Finnegan, Hutchins, and O’Donnell). He is chairman and director of Capital Research and Management Company, the privately held, Los Angeles-based investment firm, which most recently reported more than $1.1 trillion under management. He is also a trustee of Caltech.

As treasurer and HMC chair, Rothenberg has often set the tone for the University’s financial outlook, published in the annual financial report; of late, he has been cautious, even wary, about current external challenges.

Among gifts to Harvard, he has endowed the chair held by Diana Sorensen, Rothenberg professor of Romance languages and literatures and of comparative literature, and dean of arts and humanities. At the September 7 dedication of the renovated “Old Quincy” in honor of the Corporation’s late Senior Fellow Robert G. Stone Jr., Rothenberg was cited for “a truly extraordinary and selfless gift” in support of this initial House renewal project. He has been active in campaign-related fundraising in the United States and internationally.

© Monika Flueckiger/World Economic Forum, swiss-image.ch/CC-BY-SA-2.0

David M. Rubenstein

David M. Rubenstein, Parent ’07, ’10, co-founder and co-chief executive officer of The Carlyle Group, based in Washington, D.C.  Carlyle, now publicly traded, is an investment firm focused on private equity, real estate, and other assets; it manages some $180 billion in diverse funds. Rubenstein, a graduate of Duke and the University of Chicago Law School, practiced law privately and served as a U.S. Senate staff member and deputy assistant to the president during the Carter administration. He co-founded his current firm in 1987. Among his civic engagements, he is chair of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; a Smithsonian Institution regent; chair of Duke’s board of trustees; and vice chair of the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution (as is Glenn Hutchins) and of the Council on Foreign Relations board of directors. He has also been a trustee of the University of Chicago and a lead board member of New York’s Lincoln Center. 

Rubenstein knows the University in part as the father of Alexandra Nicole Rubenstein ’07 and Gabrielle W. Rubenstein ’10, and as a member of the dean’s advisory council for Harvard Business School, where his wife, Alice Rogoff Rubenstein, earned her M.B.A. in 1978.

He has been a supporter of the Harvard Kennedy School, donating $10 million in September 2004, and $5 million in 2008 for fellowships for students enrolled in the Kennedy School-Business School joint-degree program; he will chair the school's campaign. For a discussion of Rubenstein’s broader philanthropic activities, see the separate background report on his September 21 Harvard Campaign launch conversation with Bill Gates.

Gwill E. York ’79, M.B.A. ’84, co-founder and managing director of Lighthouse Capital Partners, a “venture-debt” financing firm; she is particularly focused on life-sciences investments, and works from the firm’s Cambridge office. According to her Harvard Business School biography (she served as an “entrepreneur in residence” part-time at the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship during the 2010-2011 academic year), York has been involved with advisory boards for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Medical School’s systems biology department, and the Rock Center itself. She also serves on the boards of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

She was elected to the Board of Overseers last summer. York is also a member of the Corporation-Overseer joint committee on alumni affairs and development, co-chaired by Joseph O’Donnell and Diana Nelson, and, as a co-chair of the Harvard College Fund executive committee, was a participant in the groundbreaking for the Old Quincy renovation, the first stage of undergraduate House renewal.

Photograph by Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office

Gustave Hauser

Photograph by Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office

Rita Hauser

The honorary co-chairs are:
Gustave Hauser, LL.B. ’53, and Rita Hauser, L ’58, in 2011 made the $40-million gift that established the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching—anchoring a core priority of The Harvard Campaign. Among other results of their local philanthropy, Harvard Law School’s Hauser Hall, built in the mid 1990s to provide much-needed faculty offices, bears its benefactors’ name. Similarly, the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, based at the Kennedy School, was launched with their support in 1997. Rita Hauser was recognized with a Harvard Medal at Commencement in 1999; her citation read, “Caring deeply about education, the world of nonprofits, and Harvard University, you are a dynamic inspiration to us all, conscious of the need to challenge and to lead.” The couple have also endowed the directorship of the University’s human-rights committee, and a professorship of human rights and humanitarian law. Rita Hauser was a national chair of the University Campaign, which ran from 1994 to 1999.

Sidney Knafel ’52, M.B.A. ’54, was a national campaign chair for the University Campaign. The Knafel building of Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies bears his name. He also endowed the Knafel professorship of music, held by Thomas Forrest Kelly. Upon Neil L. Rudenstine’s retirement as Harvard president in 2001, Knafel wrote about the experience of working with him on academic and campaign planning. He was awarded a Harvard Medal in 2006; the citation noted that his “enduring commitment to education and to Harvard has built a lasting legacy for our scholars and students, enabling them to make a difference in the world and a world of difference.”

This past spring, Knafel created a $10.5-million fund to support the Radcliffe Institute; the former Radcliffe gymnasium, now renovated as a conference center, was renamed in his honor—and he has signed up, again, as co-chair of the Radcliffe Campaign, which will go public later this autumn.

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