Harvard University has announced a gift of more than $15 million from private equity mogul Glenn Hutchins (JD '77, MBA '83) and the Hutchins Family Foundation to launch the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

The funds — part of a previously announced $30 million gift to the university from Hutchins — will bring together five existing entities — the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, the Neil L. and Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery, the Image of the Black Archive and Library, and the Hutchins Family Library — and four new projects — the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, the History Design Studio, the Program for the Study of Race and Gender in Science and Medicine, and the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art — under the Hutchins Center name.

The center will be launched officially on October 2 at a ceremony honoring the 2013 recipients of the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, Harvard's highest honor in the field of African and African-American studies. This year's honorees are Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to the president; playwright Tony Kushner; Rep. John Lewis (D-GA); Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, film director Steven Spielberg, and National Basketball Association commissioner David Stern.

Hutchins, a co-founder of private equity firm Silver Lake, told the New York Times he was inspired to make the gift by the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center.

"With this unprecedented gift from the Hutchins Family Foundation, we secure our place as the preeminent site for research about the African diaspora in the academy," said Gates. "What we have built under the rubric of the Du Bois Institute will continue to grow through the Hutchins Center with even greater global reach, in a way that would have made the public-minded Dr. Du Bois proud."