Edward Harkness

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edward Stephen Harkness (January 22, 1874 – January 29, 1940) was an American philanthropist. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, one of three sons to Stephen V. Harkness, a harnessmaker who invested with John D. Rockefeller and became the second-largest shareholder in Standard Oil. (His father died in 1888.) Harkness's eldest brother, William, had another mother.

Harkness attended St. Paul's School and Yale University, Class of 1897. Harkness and brothers Charles and William were members of Wolf's Head Society at Yale.^[1] After graduating, Edward Harkness married Mary Stillman, daughter of William James Stillman, and whose family had also been associated with the Rockefellers. Harkness also received an LL.D from Columbia Law School.

His elder brother Charles W. Harkness died in 1916, and in 1917 Anna Harkness, their mother, gave $3,000,000 to Yale University to build Harkness Quadrangle in his memory. In 1918 Anna Harkness established the Commonwealth Fund by an initial gift of $10,000,000, and Edward Harkness was made its president.

Harkness House, a student cooperative in Oberlin College; St. Salvator's Hall at the University of St Andrews; Harkness Chapel at Connecticut College; Butler Library at Columbia University as well as the original portions of the Columbia University Medical Center and undergraduate dorms at Brown University, Harvard University, Yale University and Connecticut College were built through his philanthropy. He also had a substantial impact on several New England boarding schools, introducing the revolutionary Harkness table method of instruction, starting with Phillips Exeter Academy, and spreading to St. Paul’s, and The Lawrenceville School.

He established the Harkness Fellowships and founded the Pilgrim Trust in the UK in 1930 with an endowment of just over two million pounds, "prompted by his admiration for what Great Britain had done in the 1914-18 war, and by his ties of affection for the land from which he drew his descent."^[2] The current priorities of the trust are preservation, places of worship, and social welfare.