50 Years of HMC
Made up of more than 13,000 individual funds invested as a single entity, the endowment’s returns enable leading financial aid programs, groundbreaking discoveries in scientific research, and hundreds of professorships across a wide range of academic fields. Approximately 80 percent of Harvard’s endowed funds are restricted by the donor to a specific school or purpose, but unrestricted funds ensure that nearly every aspect of University operations receives support.
The oldest endowed professorship
1721 gift led to long line of Hollis Chair occupants at Divinity School
Little could a wealthy London merchant know that his gift to Harvard in 1721 would transform how students are taught in today’s universities, and lead to a fundamental shift in the School’s founding ethos.
Harvard to sign on to United Nations-supported Principles For Responsible Investment
Harvard today announced its decision to sign on to the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), becoming the first university endowment in the United States to join the organization. The PRI is recognized as the leading global network for investors who are committed to integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into their investment practices and ownership policies. Harvard Management Company (HMC) will implement the principles in its management of the University’s endowment and related financial assets.
Harvard endowment to go greenhouse gas-neutral by 2050
There are few more vivid examples that show how falling carbon emissions can drastically reduce the air pollution fueling global warming than the clearer skies above scaled-back cities around the world during the coronavirus pandemic.
In an announcement Tuesday, Harvard signaled its expanding commitment to cleaner skies, targeting climate change through a new pledge to reduce emissions by monitoring its investment portfolio.
Timeline
Harvard Management Company turns 40
Celebration salutes endowment arm that works to support everyday learning
In 1974, Walter Cabot sat alone in an office at 60 Congress St. in Boston’s Financial District. Looking around at piles of freshly arrived moving boxes, he thought of the $960 million that Harvard had entrusted him to manage, and wondered what he had gotten himself into.
Harvard Management Company to make operations net-zero
Harvard Management Company (HMC) announced that it plans to make its facilities and operations net-zero of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the current fiscal year (which began on July 1, 2021), a first among higher education endowments. This effort builds off of the University’s emissions reductions plans for its campus that began in 2006 and the commitment made last year to make its endowment portfolio net-zero by 2050.
Wanted: Bold ideas
Star-Friedman Challenge puts out the call for visionary research
Uncovering a critical link between COVID-19 mortality and pollution. Changing the way climate scientists understand rising sea levels. Making and modeling the world’s smallest flying machines. These are only a few of the breakthroughs advanced by the Star-Friedman Challenge for Scientific Research.
Embedding ethics in computer science curriculum
Harvard initiative seen as a national model
Barbara Grosz has a fantasy that every time a computer scientist logs on to write an algorithm or build a system, a message will flash across the screen that asks, “Have you thought about the ethical implications of what you’re doing?”
Until that day arrives, Grosz, the Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), is working to instill in the next generation of computer scientists a mindset that considers the societal impact of their work, and the ethical reasoning and communications skills to do so.
A luminous vision for Harvard Yard
Teresita Fernández’s James Baldwin-inspired installation reacts to its surroundings
On a recent afternoon, the artist Teresita Fernández sat in the center of her latest creation, admiring the view. The sun dipped, sending rays through the thousands of orange-and-yellow-pinstriped tubes that form her Tercentenary Theatre installation, “Autumn (… Nothing Personal).” Soon the work was glowing.
As passersby slipped in and out of the frame, Fernández remarked on the work’s cinematic effect, in which “anything moving appears and disappears … as if each one of these tubes is almost like a shutter that opens and closes.” When a breeze rustled the 10-foot-high tubes, which rise from plywood benches arranged in concentric circles, the sound reminded her of “a bamboo forest.”
Bloomberg Philanthropies & Harvard create new Bloomberg Center for Cities to support mayors
$150M investment deepens commitment to bold city leadership
Bloomberg Philanthropies, in collaboration with Harvard University, announced today an expansion of support for city leaders with a new, $150 million investment to establish the University-wide Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. This center builds upon the success of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, a collaboration between Bloomberg Philanthropies, Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard Business School established in 2017, and will strengthen the capabilities of mayors and their teams, advance effective organizational practices in city halls around the world, support a new generation of public servants as they encounter unprecedented challenges in the years to come, and produce new research and instructional materials that will help city leaders.
