Before Clifton Wharton's tenure as MSU president in the 1970s, fundraising at the university was a foreign idea.
After a swank gala for major university donors on Oct. 21 at the Kellogg Center, Wharton recalled starting the university's first fundraising campaign.
Wharton and four other past MSU presidents returned to campus to celebrate a milestone in university fundraising — the collection of more than $1 billion in donations by The Campaign for MSU.
It's an enormous amount compared to the $25 million Wharton raised for the performing arts three decades ago, but it's only the latest in a trend of increasing reliance by public universities on private donations.
As of Oct. 1, the campaign, which was announced publicly in 2002, has raised $1.058 billion toward a goal of $1.2 billion. That number now seems to be an easy target, with two years left before the 2007 deadline.
Within the $1.2 billion goal is an initiative to raise MSU's endowment — funds that generate interest, which the university spends at a fixed rate each year — by $450 million.
"The progress that's been made in that time is really phenomenal," said Paul Conn, who has donated at least $10,000 to the College of Arts & Letters.
The campaign is MSU's first to eclipse $1 billion, and is only the second all-encompassing campaign in the university's history.
But the idea is hardly unprecedented as the practice has become quite widespread in recent years.
Five schools in the Big Ten are currently engaged in billion-dollar campaigns.
Capital campaigns are becoming an integral part of university growth, said Chuck Webb,
vice president for University Development and a co-director of The Campaign for MSU.
"There's not a major university in the Big Ten, or even across the country, that has not done a capital campaign. It's part of what our industry does," Webb said.
The increasing significance and scope of capital campaigns, at least at a number of Big Ten schools, can be partly traced to a weak economy and decreasing funding from state governments.
"You don't have the robust markets that we had in the 1990s," said Sandy Wilcox, president of the University of Wisconsin Foundation.
Universities have followed each other into what Wilcox described as an "arms race" to amass funds from alternative sources.
"There's a realization that things that might have been funded by the state in the past ? just aren't going to get state support because the money isn't here," said Judy Malcolm, director of development communications and donor relations at the University of Michigan.
Capital campaigns help make a wide range of projects possible, from scholarships and endowed chairs to new buildings. The drives raise people's level of giving, Malcolm said.
But there are difficulties associated with holding the campaigns as well, Wilcox said. Everyone expects some sort of gain — "It's like kids on Halloween," he said — but not all programs have equal success.
"Some of the traditionally undervalued places that don't have wealthy alumni don't do so well," he said.
Like MSU, most of the Big Ten universities in campaigns are on pace to exceed their goals. But unlike some schools, MSU's goal was a "stretch," officials admitted.
"When we did initial projections, it did not look like $1 billion was within our reach," Webb said.
At the Oct. 21 dinner, MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon shifted the campaign focus to growing endowments, where MSU has lagged behind compared to its peers.
"We were dead last for endowments amongst the Big Ten," Webb said.
MSU has since climbed to seventh in the conference in endowments.
But MSU is still short of its goal of increasing endowments.
More than 850 new endowments have been created since the beginning of the campaign, but the university still needs to raise $169.6 million before the deadline. Webb said organizers expect to reach that goal, even though he and his colleagues called it "aggressive" and even "unrealistic."
MSU has seen positive returns on its investments every year for the last decade, but similar efforts by other universities to grow their endowments might prevent MSU from jumping much higher in the rankings.
