The Harvard Campaign, officially launched on September 21 after the quietest of quiet phases, seeks $6.5 billion—the largest initial target ever set in American higher education—and begins its public phase with $2.8 billion already received or pledged. (That exceeds the total of $2.65 billion raised during the last fundraising drive, the University Campaign, which concluded in 1999.)
President Drew Faust’s keynote address (see page 57) sketched the campaign’s aims thematically: “Creating new knowledge, reimagining teaching and learning, engaging globally, reinventing the spaces where we learn and live, attracting and inspiring the best students and faculty.” She also put Harvard in the early twenty-first century in the context of universities’ continuing importance to society in sustaining liberal-arts learning and humanistic inquiry—and in the context of the changing external environment. Detailed priorities and aspirations—for professorships, new programs, facilities, and so on—will apparently unfold later, when a formal campaign case statement is published and individual schools’ campaigns emerge (for some hints, see
