Harvard University announced Wednesday that it is launching the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research with a $15 million gift from a family foundation endowed by financier and Harvard alum Glenn Hutchins. The Hutchins Center will supersede the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute for African and African American Research, which houses the institutes, archives, publications and libraries associated with Harvard’s well-known Department of African and African-American Studies.
The new center will encompass the Du Bois Research Institute, the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, the Image of the Black Archive and Library, the Du Bois Review, Transition Magazine, the Neil L. and Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery, and the Hutchins Family Library.
In addition, four new research entities will come under the purview of the Hutchins Center. They are the Afro-Latin American Research Institute; the History Design Studio; the Program for the Study of Race and Gender in Science and Medicine; and the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, according to the university.
Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center, said in a statement that the expansion of university resources for African and African American research represents a development that would have been heartily embraced by Du Bois, the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. The Du Bois Research Institute was founded in 1975.
“With this unprecedented gift from the Hutchins Family Foundation, we secure our place as the pre-eminent site for research about the African diaspora in the academy. What we have built under the rubric of the Du Bois Institute will continue to grow through the Hutchins Center with even greater global reach, in a way that would have made the public-minded Dr. Du Bois proud,” Gates said.
The Hutchins’ gift is part of a $30-million donation he gave to Harvard in 2012 that established the Hutchins Family Challenge Fund for House Renewal and to back academic initiatives of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Hutchins is a co-founder of Silver Lake, a major investment firm that invests in technology companies.
