San Francisco

Stanford University has received a gift of $400 million from the foundation established by Hewlett-Packard founder William Hewlett. The donation is thought to be the largest ever made to an institution of higher education.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which announced the gift on 2 May, hopes it will inspire further donations to universities.

Hewlett was a Stanford graduate who in 1936 co-founded Hewlett-Packard, the electronics company that was to play a central role in the development of Silicon Valley. He died in January at the age of 87, but his son Walter, who is chairman of the Hewlett Foundation, said the gift had been planned for over a year.

Sunny outlook: William Hewlett's donation will aid humanities and science at Stanford. Credit: AP

A quarter of the money is earmarked for undergraduate education. The rest will go to the School of Humanities and Sciences, the largest of Stanford's seven schools but one less well-endowed than others such as medicine or engineering.

The School of Humanities and Sciences includes most of the university's basic science departments and research labs. Walter Hewlett, who also serves on the school's advisory council, said that it was threatened by budgetary pressures.

“It became clear to me that if something wasn't done to put the school on a more firm financial footing, there would be a major deterioration,” he said.

William Hewlett and Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard, also a Stanford graduate, had already given some $300 million to the university over the years.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac, the only larger gift to higher education on record is the $1 billion pledged by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates in 1999 for the Gates Millennium Scholars Program.