Major donors are critical to your higher education institution’s success. Whether they provide funding for capital campaigns, research projects, scholarships, fellowships, or academic programs, their financial support and commitment allow your university to achieve its goals and advance its mission.
I’ll admit it. I’ve been slacking! It’s been a few weeks since I last sat down to write this blog. In the interim, I have traveled a bit, met with clients, played a few rounds of golf and hung out with my family. So yes, I have been remiss in not keeping up with my writing assignment. But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been thinking about it. In fact, just like when I put things off in college, I have been thinking about it a lot!
One of the things about which I have been thinking came to light just the other day. I drove a friend of my daughter, Cameron, up to Lake Forest College on the north shore of Chicago. This friend wanted to look at the College, and I just happened to be going in that direction. It was fun to be back on the Lake Forest campus, where I served as vice president for development in the early eighties. Much of the campus is exactly the same (right down to the carpet in the administration building, which needed replacing when I was there and still does!). The College, however, has made a number of important physical improvements, including a beautiful addition to the Donnelley Library and a major addition to the student union. All in all, the campus looks great.
I have been spending the last few days in Southern California, accompanying my daughter, Cameron, on a new student weekend at Occidental College, where she intends to enroll in the fall. OXY is a beautiful place, a lovely campus and just the kind of college I was hoping Cameron would choose. And needless to say, for a competitive swimmer, the thought of swimming (and sunning) outdoors year-round must be extremely attractive. If I was heading off to college these days, I’m not sure Galesburg, Illinois would be on my list of top locations to spend four years!
When I was a young development officer, I worked for 5 years at the University of Nevada in Reno. Now, this is the REAL University in the system, not the basketball factory down in Las Vegas! The University of Nevada has a medical school and preeminent schools of mining and agriculture. This place was and continues to be the real deal.
Fundraising was pretty new at the University, and we all wore a number of hats. One of mine was to oversee a major fundraising gala for the academic programs at the University, kind of a counter-point to the huge events held in support of the University’s athletic department. One year, a local hotel (in Reno, they are hotel-casinos) offered us the opening night performance of a revival of a big Broadway show that was coming to town–“Hello Dolly,” starring Carol Channing. Of course, we jumped at the chance to raise academic funds from what we knew would be a very popular event.
North Hall at Lake Forest College is an old residence hall. My guess is that it was all men or all women–these were the days before co-ed living facilities on college campuses. The building was renovated in the fifties or sixties to house the College administration. Business office on the first floor, President’s Office on the second, and the alumni and development office on the third. On the fourth floor, which was never really renovated, the old dorm rooms house file cabinets–one after the other, full of alumni records. Every bit of information is in those files, from the student’s original application to the College to any note or letter that was ever sent to him/her as an alum of the College. The files fill a number of the rooms on the fourth floor of North Hall, and I can tell you that it is a bit disconcerting to be sitting in an office on the third floor, thinking of all that weight one floor up. Hey, it’s an old building! I often sat there wondering when that file cabinet with Richard Widmark’s file (he was a graduate of the College and a former acting teacher) would end up in my lap! Trust me, it is hard to concentrate with thoughts like that running through your mind.
Think about it. Pretend you are a college student, registered at any given institution, taking most of your courses online with the blessing of the school. Soon, you begin to hear that there are some really interesting classes offered by other institutions that will give credit toward your degree. Then you learn that there are a lot of these courses that you can take for much less money than the tuition your home campus is charging. Then you realize that you can take all of your courses online, from a variety of schools, for a lot less than signing up to attend a traditional campus based institution, even if it offers online courses and accepts others. Granted, the ultimate degree won’t be as recognizable, or as prestigious as the traditional system we have known in this country, but then again, perhaps that’s not what counts anymore.
As all of us are aware, we live in an age of rapidly changing communications systems, and this is causing an unending series of changes to our society – not merely our practices, but how we relate to one another. Written letters have given way to e-mails, and e-mails are yielding to texting. Shared land lines are disappearing in favor of cell phones, and smart phones now mean that many people no longer even answer a mobile call unless its necessity has first been justified in a text message. The social consequences of this include such things as a reduction in the depth and thoughtfulness of interpersonal communications in exchange for vastly increased frequency and breadth of contact. The trend is most obvious among the Millennials, but it is not uncommon to see people of any age busily thumbing away throughout dinner in very nice restaurants, oblivious to their table partners.