News from
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Communications and Publications, Stanhope Hall
Princeton, New Jersey 08544
Tel 609/258-3601; Fax 609/258-1301
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Justin Harmon (609) 258-5732
Date: October 25, 1996
Laurance Rockefeller Gift to Support Teaching, Study at University Center for Human Values
PRINCETON, N.J. -- Laurance S. Rockefeller '32, whose gifts to Princeton have touched virtually every aspect of the life of the University, has given $5 million to further the work of the University Center for Human Values, Princeton's forum for education and scholarship on ethical issues and human values. Rockefeller's new gift will fund an endowed professorship for a distinguished teacher and graduate fellowships for scholars whose work incorporates a focus on ethical and moral issues.
The Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professorship will be the first of four chairs meant to bring distinguished teachers to campus each year. Each visiting professor will teach an undergraduate course in collaboration with an academic department and will exchange ideas about teaching with Princeton faculty and graduate students. The visiting professorship program is one of a set of teaching initiatives announced by Princeton President Harold T. Shapiro last February.
The Laurance S. Rockefeller Prize Fellowships will support graduate students from various departments whose work has important ethical components. The fellowship program, which began as a pilot project supported by the Mellon Foundation, brings graduate fellows together to discuss their work, share teaching ideas and examine moral issues that confront their various disciplines.
"No one has been more loyal to Princeton than Laurance Rockefeller," said Shapiro. "It is fitting that his gift to the Anniversary Campaign goes to the heart of our enterprise -- support for our teaching initiatives and for the ethical values he embodies so well."
The University Center for Human Values was founded in 1990 with a $21 million gift from Rockefeller, has focused interest for students and faculty across the disciplines on the ways in which moral choices and values affect both public and private life. Rockefeller has called his gift to establish the center "the fulfillment of my Princeton education."
"Princeton has always symbolized, for me, the great human potential for bringing mind, body and spirit into a unified focus," said Rockefeller. "I am so glad to be able to support this center and the superb teachers and scholars who are studying the profound questions we all must face on this planet together."
"Mr. Rockefeller's original grant established the Center, and this generous new gift ensures that it will continue to grow and expand," said the Center's director, Professor George Kateb, who is also director of the Program in Political Philosophy. "What he's done is to add bounty to bounty."
Rockefeller's major gifts to Princeton now total $45 million. His previous gifts include a $4 million gift in 1969 that build Spelman Halls, a dormitory complex named for his grandmother, which helped Princeton accomplish its transition to undergraduate coeducation; a $5 million gift in 1980 in honor of his brother, John D. Rockefeller III '29, that established a new residential college at a time Princeton was reorganizing living arrangements for freshmen and sophomores; and a $10 million gift in 1986 that enabled the University to build the Lewis Thomas Laboratory, home of its Department of Molecular Biology.
The University is in the midst of a fund-raising campaign in honor of the 250th anniversary of its founding in 1746. The five-year, $750 million Anniversary Campaign for Princeton will seek to add to the University's resources in five major areas: unrestricted support; undergraduate education and campus life; graduate education; academic and research initiatives; and facilities for research and education.