Harvard Gets Its Largest Donation Ever: $400 Million for Engineering

[Updated (6/3/2015, 5:01 p.m.) with criticism of the donation and a response from Mr. Paulson.]

Harvard University will receive its largest donation ever in the form of a $400-million endowment to support its engineering school, the university announced on Wednesday. John A. Paulson, a billionaire who founded the investment firm Paulson & Company, is behind the gift to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which will be renamed in his honor.

“John Paulson’s extraordinary gift will enable the growth and ensure the strength of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard for the benefit of generations to come,” said Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s president, in a news release.

Mr. Paulson is a graduate of Harvard Business School. In the release he called the engineering school “the next frontier for Harvard.”

The gift comes in the midst of a fund-raising campaign, launched publicly in 2013, that Harvard hopes will bring in $6.5 billion.

Many higher-education observers were less than enthralled by Mr. Paulson’s donation, given that Harvard already possesses an enormous endowment (upward of $30 billion) and enrolls many students from wealthy families.

Writing in Vox, Dylan Matthews argued that Mr. Paulson’s donation guaranteed him “a special plaque in philanthropist hell.” He continued: “Harvard is not a charity. If you want to donate to it as a bribe to help your kids get in, go nuts. It’s not the absolute worst thing you could do with your money. Kidnapping people and making them fight to the death in gladiator pits would be worse. But if you want to make the world a better place, your dollars are better spent literally anywhere else.”

The author Malcolm Gladwell took to Twitter to rail against the gift:

It came down to helping the poor or giving the world’s richest university $400 mil it doesn’t need. Wise choice John! http://t.co/2bFmuTy397

— Gladwell (@Gladwell) June 3, 2015

If billionaires don’t step up, Harvard will soon be down to its last $30 billion.

— Gladwell (@Gladwell) June 3, 2015

Responding to the criticism, Mr. Paulson told The Financial Times that the money would be used “largely for financial aid and scholarships” and would support “research that is going to be beneficial and impactful to all humanity.”