According to a list kept by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology held the previous record for a single gift to a university: an estimated $350 million from Patrick J. McGovern Jr. and his wife, Lore Harp McGovern, that was announced last year. That money is to be given over 20 years to pay for brain research.

Officials at Rensselaer Polytechnic said the donor of the $360 million was the same person who had agreed to make a $130 million gift late last year. But the donor instead decided to nearly triple it. The officials declined to say anything about the structure or timing of the gift, or about whether they had any of it in hand, saying such disclosures might compromise the donor's anonymity.

Although many universities have shown great proficiency in recent years in drawing huge gifts from wealthy alumni, the institute did not seem to have that knack.

Some of its alumni have helped found or manage leading technology companies like Texas Instruments, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems and other high-technology companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. But before the $130 million announced a few months ago, its largest single gift had been for $15 million. And that gift was not even from a graduate of the institute; it was from Kenneth Lally, a local industrialist who was also a university trustee, and his wife, Thelma, for the School of Management and Technology.

David Haviland, the vice president for institute advancement, said the institute's fund-raising record was ''less a question of whether we have tapped our alumni effectively and more a question of whether we have stirred their blood.''