Harvard Donors Pony Up $50 Million To Endow New PhD Fellowships
- GAB NEWS
- 5 hours ago
- 3 min read
A group of Harvard University alumni have committed $50 million to endow 50 new PhD fellowships in the university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The gifts represent an effort to shore up financial support for graduate students during a period of continuing political and economic pressures on the institution.
The initiative, announced by FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra on Tuesday, will be used to create a matching fund with the ultimate goal of raising $100 million by June 30, according to The Harvard Crimson.
The donations include a lead gift from Alfred Lin, managing partner of the venture capital firm Sequoia, and Rebecca Lin. Additional support was contributed by Harvard alumni Rui Dong, Thor Johnson, Brian D. Young, and Anne Young, according to Harvard Magazine.
The fellowships will be awarded to Ph.D. candidates across all three of FAS’s academic divisions — Arts and Humanities, Social Science, and Science — in addition to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Final decisions about specific allocations have not yet been made and will depend to some extent on the preferences of donors.
“Graduate student support is a top priority for faculty across our Divisions and SEAS,” Hoekstra wrote in a letter to students and faculty this week. “This initiative reflects a shift from responding to constraints to investing strategically in our core academic activities.”
The Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences enrolls more than 2,500 Ph.D. students across FAS and SEAS; they receive an annual stipend of at least $50,000, reported Harvard Magazine.
The donations come at a critical time for Harvard, which, like several other leading private universities, has faced serious financial challenges from the Trump administration.
In October, acknowledging its budget problems, the university indicated it would significantly reduce the number of new PhD students it would admit. The magnitude of the reduction has been something of a moving target. Initially, FAS officials said that Ph.D. admissions would be reduced by more than 50% over the next two years, with the sciences division looking at a 75% cut. But after Harvard prevailed in a lawsuit against the government that resulted in the restoration of more than $2 billion in previously canceled federal grants, administrators indicated that new PhD admissions in the sciences would be lowered by 50%.
The endowment initiative is intended to help the university weather some of the financial head winds it’s facing as a result of several developments, including an increased tax on its existing endowment and a continuing campaign by the administration to force the university to meet a broad set of President Trump’s political demands and legal threats.
While the president has repeatedly said a deal with Harvard to end the dispute would soon be forthcoming, an agreement between the parties now seems less likely than ever. This week, after a New York Times report said the president was dropping his demand for a cash payment from Harvard to cement a deal, Trump denied he was backing off and instead upped the ante, demanding a $1 billion payment from the university to end the stalemate.
"The Failing New York Times story was completely wrong concerning Harvard University,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “I hereby demand that the morons that run (into the ground!) the Times’ change their story, immediately.”
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