Dive Brief:

• A private equity investor is expected to announce more than $15 million to create the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard.
• The gift is part of a previously announced $30 million donation, but the uses had not all been specified.
• The donor, Glenn Hutchins, is close friends with prominent professor of African and African-American studies Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Dive Insight:

Hutchins and Gates are buddies who have lunch in Manhattan and go out together on fishing trips. The two also took Hutchins’s mother to last month's 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Hutchins and Gates met 10 years ago while Hutchins was on vacation in Martha's Vineyard and happened across a symposium being delivered by Gates, and their friendship is bearing real fruit: The new center will incorporate nine separate entities on campus and will help solidify Harvard as a leader in African-American studies.