June 1, 2023

David Barclay traces his commitment to the Pardee RAND Graduate School back to a conversation he had in Uzbekistan years ago. It was with a former student who talked about how the scholarship he received to attend the school had changed his life.

Barclay, whose titles have included portfolio manager and executive vice president at one of the largest financial services firms in the world, has been a Pardee RAND supporter ever since. His gifts in just the past few years total $1 million, much of it to support student scholarships. He’s also served on the school’s Board of Governors since 2016.

“That student I met in Uzbekistan didn’t have a lot of financial resources to come to the school,” Barclay said. “But he was from a part of the world that was, at the time, remaking itself. It needed really smart, talented people to help build a new society.

“That was my introduction. It made me really think about how important it is to get smart people into public policy. We need to make the path to get them there as easy as possible.”

Barclay, now retired, made his career at the Capital Group Companies, a global investment management organization, where he also served as research director, board member, and president of two top mutual funds. It wasn’t by chance that he found himself in Uzbekistan meeting with a former Pardee RAND student. One of his colleagues at the time served on the school’s board and made a point of introducing him.

He had done community development work in the Philippines and volunteered with a land-rights group that helps the rural poor in developing countries. His early interest in Pardee RAND fit with that same desire to empower people, at home and around the world, to build the future they want to see.

“We need well-qualified people to help us in the government sphere, in the nonprofit sphere, in civil society,” he said. “If we can make it easier and more attractive to get people who are so inclined to go in that direction, that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing for the United States, and it’s a good thing throughout the world.”

Barclay and his wife, Araceli Rosal Barclay, gave $500,000 to support a sweeping redesign of Pardee RAND in 2019. The effort created three streams of study and action for the school’s Ph.D. students. One focuses on traditional policy research and analysis; another looks more closely at the applications and implications of advanced technology.

But Barclay’s gift focused on the third stream. It puts students into local communities to not just study policy on the ground but to work with community members to effect real and lasting change. “That really stood out to me as something new,” Barclay said, “an opportunity to have long-term, sustainable impact at the community level.”

Since 2021, Barclay has given $500,000 more to support scholarships for current and future students. Those gifts were part of RAND’s Tomorrow Demands Today fundraising campaign, the most ambitious that RAND has ever undertaken. Its goal is to raise $400 million.

Nancy Staudt, the Frank and Marcia Carlucci Dean of Pardee RAND and vice president of innovation at RAND, describes Barclay as a trusted advisor and true supporter of the school’s students and faculty. “His advice, gifts, and donations over the last many years have enabled the school to accomplish so much and to advance our mission to educate the next generation of global policy leaders,” she said.

Barclay said what motivated his gifts was the same thing that inspired his interest all those years ago: meeting with students; hearing their stories; and wanting to help more smart, talented young people make public policy their career. After all, he said, “the world needs more Pardee RAND graduates.”