JOHN PAULSON GIVES $400 MILLION TO HARVARD FOR ENGINEERING SCHOOL
By TAMAR LEWIN / JUNE 3, 2015
Harvard announced Wednesday that the billionaire hedge fund manager John A. Paulson had given a $400 million endowment to support the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences — the largest gift in the university’s history.
Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, said in a statement that Mr. Paulson’s appreciation for the importance of the engineering school “to faculty, students and schools across the university” had led to the gift. The donation, Dr. Faust said, “will change Harvard and enhance our impact on the world beyond.”
Mr. Paulson, 59, a 1980 graduate of Harvard Business School, is the founder of Paulson & Co., a hedge fund that manages $19.5 billion for wealthy individuals and pension funds like the New York State Common Retirement Fund.
He is among the best paid hedge fund managers and took home $2.3 billion in 2013, according to a ranking by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine. Like many others in the hedge fund industry, Mr. Paulson takes a management fee of 1 to 2 percent of assets under management and a performance fee of 20 percent of any annual gains.
He is also known for his expensive taste in art; the walls of his office in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan are lined with Alexander Calder watercolors.
In recent years, Mr. Paulson has had triumphs in investment and defeats. Last year, Paulson & Co. lost many of its investors, and some of his funds recorded double-digit losses. Several years earlier, in 2007, Mr. Paulson made $15 billion betting against the housing bubble. The firm’s largest fund, Paulson Partners, makes bets on mergers and acquisitions and has returned investors an annual 13.6 percent over two decades.
His gift to Harvard helped the university’s $6.5 billion fund-raising campaign, which started publicly in September 2013.
As soon as the gift was announced, a chorus of criticism erupted, much of it mocking Mr. Paulson for choosing to add to Harvard’s wealth rather than extend his generosity to causes or institutions that help the needy.
The best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, for example, wrote on Twitter, “It came down to helping the poor or giving the world’s richest university $400 million it doesn’t need. Wise choice John!”
The engineering school, to be renamed the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is expanding across the river from Cambridge, Mass., to Allston, to a new science campus adjacent to Harvard Business School and the Harvard Innovation Lab.
Since 2007, the engineering school has added undergraduate concentrations in biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering, as well as a master’s program in computational science and engineering. Course enrollment has increased by nearly 150 percent.
“For 379 years, Harvard has had a profound global impact across a multitude of disciplines that benefits all of humanity,” Mr. Paulson said in a statement. “SEAS is the next frontier for Harvard, and its expanding campus in Allston promises to become the next major center of innovation.”
In recent years, the engineering school’s labs have developed an organ-on-a-chip platform that can be used for drug testing, self-organizing robots, nanotechnology devices that are changing optical electronics, an implantable cancer vaccine and new knowledge about the links between atmospheric chemistry and climate change.
Harvard received its second-largest gift, $350 million from the Morningside Foundation for the School of Public Health, last year.
