June 23, 2006
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June 22nd, 2006
Ellison gift to Harvard absent
$115 MILLION PLEDGE FOR HEALTH INSTITUTE STILL NOT FULFILLED
By Michelle Quinn
Mercury News
Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison has yet to follow through on a verbal promise to give Harvard University $115 million to set up a research center for the study of global health, although what exactly happened between Ellison and Harvard remains unclear.
As a result, plans for the Ellison Institute for World Health at Harvard are on hold, and three senior managers who had already been hired have been dismissed. The center planned to hire 20 research fellows and 130 staff members by next summer and had already chosen its board of trustees.
``As of today, the gift agreement hasn't been signed,'' Sarah Friedell, a spokeswoman with Harvard's Office of Alumni Affairs and Development, said in an interview Wednesday.
But why it hasn't been signed remains a mystery.
Ellison surprised the philanthropy world in May 2005 when he began to talk publicly about the $115 million gift, which would have been the biggest in Harvard's history. The university has an endowment of $25.9 billion.
But at the time, Harvard did not confirm that an agreement had been reached with Ellison.
People familiar with Ellison's ideas for the project said the idea for the center came from conversations Ellison had with Lawrence Summers, Harvard's president and a former U.S. secretary of the treasury. The two men discussed the center as an economic research project, using database technology to track improvements in world health. Summers, who is an economist, would have played a role in shepherding the project.
But for the past 18 months, Summers' tenure at Harvard has been rocky, with internal clashes with professors, a legal scandal involving a friend and colleague and a firestorm over comments he made about women and science. In February, Summers announced he would resign June 30. According to some people familiar with the discussions over the center, without Summers, the deal lost momentum.
According to the Financial Times, which first reported the story Wednesday, officials at Harvard say that Ellison made the promise to give the money in March 2005. Ellison's associates then told Harvard it would begin to see the money after Ellison settled an insider trading suit brought by Oracle shareholders.
In November, Ellison settled a shareholders suit in San Mateo County court by agreeing to donate $100 million to charity.
But Harvard has not heard directly from Ellison since November, according to the Financial Times.
``This happens, but it is very rare,'' said James Ferris, director of the Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California. ``There's a dance that goes on.''
Ellison has been involved in another donation controversy. In 2001, Ellison talked with Stanford University about giving $150 million to create an institute to study technology's effect on politics and economics. Then Harvard began to vie for the money. So far, neither university has announced the creation of a center.
An Oracle spokesman declined to comment.
Ellison has created a name for himself in the medical world with the Ellison Medical Foundation, based in Bethesda, Md., which funds biomedical research into the understanding of the aging processes and age-related diseases and disabilities.
``The innovation and creative impact of the Ellison Institute has moved the field in aging research,'' said Barry Bloom, dean of Harvard's School of Public Health, who is also a board member of the Ellison Medical Foundation.
Bloom says he has not been involved with the funding of the Harvard center. His work on the board of Ellison's foundation would have created a conflict of interest, he said.
Although projects sometimes get started before the financing arrives, Bloom said he was surprised that Harvard counted on the money and began to recruit people before the agreement was signed.
``I hope to hell they have learned their lesson,'' he said.
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