$12.5 million from Chip and Juliet Bergh leads $50 million in bicentennial gifts to college
Chip Bergh left College Hill in 1979 with a degree in international affairs. Over the next several decades he served as a U.S. Army officer in Cold War West Germany, spent nearly 30 years at Procter & Gamble, and then led Levi Strauss & Co. as president and CEO for more than 12 years.
Recently, at the black-tie ball marking Lafayette College’s 200th anniversary, he and his wife, Juliet, made sure that every Lafayette student could take the same kind of chance on the wider world.
They pledged $12.5 million to endow the Bergh Family Fellows program in perpetuity.
The Berghs’ gift led $50 million in new gifts and commitments that President Nicole Hurd announced at the Bicentennial Ball.
Nearly 400 alumni, parents, and friends gathered in the Bicentennial Village on the Quad, in the city whose citizens founded the college two centuries ago. The evening ended with a private concert by Harry Connick Jr.
The new commitment builds on a gift the couple made in 2022. That $5.25 million gift, the largest Lafayette had received for student internships, research, and study abroad, created the Bergh Family Fellows.
The program gives $5,000 fellowships so that students can take on those experiences regardless of what their families can afford, and it has supported 200 students a year. Its effect was immediate. In its first year, Lafayette gave more students more aid for off-campus study than ever before.
For the first time, every participating student with financial need received help. Fellows have since run cancer experiments in San Diego, studied languages in West Africa, and paired engineering degrees with internships abroad.
The new endowment makes an expanded version of the program permanent.
“Chip and Juliet’s vision for our students is grounded in a deep commitment to both leadership and opportunity,” Hurd said.
“Hundreds of students have been impacted by the Berghs’ initial transformational gift, resulting in admissions to graduate schools and launching careers. With this endowment, these opportunities will be available to our students forevermore.”
Bergh, a Lafayette trustee and now a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, has stayed close to his alma mater.
He has returned to campus to lecture on leadership and helped launch the Bergh Startup Accelerator for student entrepreneurs. With the 2022 gift, he and Juliet also created a mentoring award named for Ilan Peleg, his faculty advisor and lifelong friend.
That award honors the bond between a teacher and a student, and the same idea runs through the rest of the night’s announcements.
Alumni, parents, and friends committed $20.5 million to endow eight professorships, the most Lafayette has ever announced at once. The chairs span art history, the humanities, environmental sciences, economics, applied ethics and leadership, finance, and data science.
Some will bring new faculty to Easton, and others will support professors already teaching there. “Outstanding faculty are at the heart of the Lafayette experience,” said board chair Jefferson W. Kirby.
Another $17 million from several donors will go to campus facilities.
That includes $15 million for athletics facilities and wellness initiatives and $2 million for new spaces in the McCartney II residences, which builds momentum for the college’s campus master plan.
Together, the gifts advance Becoming Lafayette, the college’s strategic plan for its third century. Hurd linked the night back to the college’s namesake, a man who “gave himself to a cause larger than his own.”
“Tonight, the Lafayette family answered in that same spirit,” she said. “Tonight we honored our first 200 years by investing in our third century. On, Lafayette!”