Schumann Endowment Aims to Keep Harvard Healthy

By Alvin Powell

Contributing Writer

College students are famous for not taking the best care of themselves. For starters, they stay up too late and eat the wrong foods.

Helmut Schumann, a 1941 Harvard graduate, wanted to give Harvard students the knowledge to help them live healthy lives, hopefully into a ripe old age.

The Helmut W. Schumann Endowment for Healthful Living at Harvard was created in 1992 to fund projects that would increase knowledge, awareness, and education about healthy living.

Since its inception, the endowment has funded workshops on stress, lectures on violence, studies of alcoholism, and focus groups to evaluate student life at Harvard.

"His goal was to make Harvard students ambassadors of health," said David Rosenthal, director of University Health Services. "I think one of the most important things [the endowment has done] is outreach and getting the health message out to students."

Rosenthal said the next initiative to be funded by the endowment will be an effort to increase health resources and communication with students on the Internet.

Schumann had planned annual gifts to bring the endowment up to $1 million. The fund hadn't reached that goal when he died in 1994, but subsequent gifts by his children will bring the endowment up to that level, according to Charles Collier, senior planned giving adviser at the University Development Office.

"The gist was to have the endowment serve as venture philanthropy, a fund to start up grassroots kinds of promotions within the college and to fund innovative research, everything from alcoholism to sleep disorders," Collier said.

Schumann's goals and vision won praise from Dan Federman, dean for medical education in the Faculty of Medicine, who sits on the endowment's board. The challenges facing healthy living are so vast, Federman said, that board members have sometimes used Schumann endowment funds along with those of other projects in order to run more effective programs.

"He was a very well-intentioned, kind person who had his eyes on a very important goal," Federman said.

Schumann received an A.B. from Harvard in 1941 and went on to build and run Precise Products Corp. in Wisconsin and in West Germany. He developed an interest in preventive health after suffering a heart attack and became convinced that America's health care system had the wrong approach. Schumann felt the health care system should focus on preventing illness rather than simply treating it.

"Helmut Schumann's passion in promoting healthful living and the University's interest in health-related issues and research came together in a wonderful way to have an impact on the life of the college," Collier said.

In addition to the endowment, Schumann financed several other health-related activities, including the Schumann Fellowship, for a Harvard postgraduate student working in the field of preventive medicine; a health-related lectureship at Dartmouth; and a fellowship at the Tufts University School of Nutrition. He also financed two grants for Harvard undergraduates working in applied physics, his area of concentration while at Harvard.

The Schumann Endowment for Healthful Living at Harvard was set up to be run cooperatively by three Schools: Harvard College, the School of Public Health, and the Medical School.

Schumann's daughter, Petra Schumann, who graduated from Harvard in 1988, said the family wanted to honor her father's wishes with additional gifts. She said she saw the need for health education at Harvard during her years here. A vegetarian, she said she had difficulty finding healthy food in the dining halls. Macaroni loaded with fatty cheese was a common example of a vegetarian meal then, she said.

"I think everyone in the family shares his commitment to teaching healthy living," Petra Schumann said. "It's a commitment my family wanted to follow through on."