Hey, look, news in the NYTimes Dealbook that doesn’t make me want to hang someone:
Just over 10 years ago, the private equity mogul Glenn Hutchins was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. With his 25th Harvard College reunion near, he was thinking about how to put some of his wealth to good use.
One afternoon, clad in a T-shirt and board shorts, he stopped at an old whaling chapel, where Henry Louis Gates Jr., the prominent professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard, was leading a symposium….
Since then, Mr. Hutchins has strengthened his connection to Mr. Gates and the Harvard program. Their bond will become stronger on Wednesday, when Mr. Hutchins is expected to announce a gift of more than $15 million to create the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research, solidifying Harvard’s program as one of the top in its field…
The men took Mr. Hutchins’s nonagenarian mother to the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington last month. Afterward, Professor Gates took Mr. Hutchins’s younger son to a meeting with President Obama. The financier’s older son took a class with the professor last school year, though the son concluded that while Professor Gates was “entertaining,” the course’s other leader, Professor Lawrence D. Bobo, was “really smart.”…
Now their work and Mr. Hutchins’s money will create the Hutchins Center, named at the insistence of Professor Gates. It will unite nine entities, including the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute and the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art.
All will be housed in a building on Harvard Square with a street front facade designed by David Adjaye, the prominent Ghanian-British architect, chosen at Professor Gates’s urging…
The new institute will hold a ceremony next month honoring individuals for their contributions to African and African-American studies, including Steven Spielberg, the director; Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice; Representative John Lewis, the civil rights veteran; and David Stern, the departing commissioner of the National Basketball Association. (It helps that Mr. Hutchins is a part owner of the Boston Celtics.)…
Yeah, it might be asked: Why Harvard, not Howard? But then, Harvard (and Boston) could certainly use a Big Serious Academic Statement that African & African-American studies are important, “real” fields of study, not just popcult timekillers for trustafarians and aspiring tokens. (And the whole process has undoubtably given Larry Summers another big sad, too.)