Nancy Arkelyan Huntington ’55 was a Radcliffe graduate working in Harvard’s Department of Government when a young professor came in looking for help on a speech he was writing for Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign. She helped him edit and retype the piece, and remembers that he bought beer and sandwiches for them to celebrate delivering it to the post office on time. It was the beginning of their partnership together.
Her husband, Sam Huntington PhD ’51 went on to become a leading political scientist and a passionate teacher. As the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor, he taught for more than 50 years at Harvard, was a prodigious author and editor, and, known internationally, helped to shape national policymaking.
But it was what Nancy didn’t know about Sam that helped her decide how she wanted to give back to Harvard.
“After he died in 2008, I found a little notebook of Sam’s from his graduate school days, and it was itemized with all of his expenses, down to the last five cents for a cup of coffee. It was a revelation to see how frugally he lived,” says Nancy, “and I thought, he loved his students, why don’t we help them with fellowships?”
As a result, a group of generous alumni and friends, including many of his former students, established the Samuel Huntington Doctoral Fellowships in his memory. Each year Nancy contributes to the fund and has made a bequest to it. The fund provides dissertation support for doctoral students in the social sciences.
She is thrilled to know that she is supporting the kinds of graduate students that made her husband late for dinner. “He loved his students. I remember asking him why he was so late, and he would say, for example, ‘Oh, one of my students stopped by and we were mixing it up—national politics, foreign policy, his dissertation.’ That was the relationship he had with them.”
She hopes that her gift will help the same kinds of students. “I want them to be able to branch out and to pursue their research, free of economic constraints,” she says.
Nancy is passionate about her Harvard connections. In addition to her 51-year marriage to Sam, she is the mother of two Harvard graduates, Timothy ’83 and Nicholas ’87, and for 20 years she was an administrator of executive education programs at the Harvard Kennedy School. She recently celebrated her 60th Reunion and delights in running into Harvard-affiliated people while serving on local boards in Lexington, Massachusetts, and Martha’s Vineyard, where she splits her time.
She is especially proud to think of the impact the fellowship program has and will have on the future of both scholarship and politics. “When I get the list of the recipients every summer, my eyes fill up,” says Nancy. “Sam would be so pleased with the breadth and depth of their research activities. So many of these students go on to do such wonderful work. I have such a sense of optimism from them.”
Support Harvard today with a gift to the Graduate School Fund.
This story first appeared in Colloquy, the alumni magazine for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.