June 28, 2006
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Ellison rescinds $115 million Harvard donation
GIFT WOULD HAVE BEEN SCHOOL’S LARGEST
By John Boudreau
Mercury News
Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison decided against making a $115 million donation to set up a research center at Harvard University after Harvard President Lawrence Summers decided to resign, an Oracle spokesman said Tuesday.
Instead, the Oracle chief is planning to announce another major gift “in the next few weeks,” Oracle spokesman Bob Wynne said.
Ellison started talking publicly in 2005 about giving $115 million to Harvard — which would have been the school’s largest gift ever — to create a research center on global health.
Three senior managers for what would have been the Ellison Institute for World Health were hired, then laid off recently, even though Ellison never formally agreed to the gift, Wynne said. The center planned to hire 20 research fellows and 130 staff members by next summer and had already chosen its board of trustees.
“It was Larry Summers who was really the brainchild of this whole concept, and it was Larry Summers with whom Larry Ellison had the relationship,” not the university, Wynne added. “There was never any formal agreement.”
They were discussing the creation of an institute that would study and rank the effectiveness of government health programs around the world. After months of campus controversy surrounding his leadership, Summers announced in February that he would resign. His last day is Friday.
As the controversy intensified, Ellison reconsidered his plan to fund the institute, Wynne said.
“Larry Summers developed an economic model to get at this question,” he said. His impending departure caused Ellison to “change his decision to make his contribution to Harvard.”
Wynne would not provide details about Ellison’s next philanthropic move, though he said it could be a donation to an academic institution.
Separately, Oracle said Monday that Ellison is giving $100 million to the Ellison Medical Foundation of Bethesda, Md., over the next five years to settle a shareholder lawsuit claiming he improperly sold $900 million of company stock in 2001.
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