U gears up for major fundraising effort

Bollinger

A massive, Universitywide planning effort is under way to help define priorities for a fundraising campaign that will be launched in 2002. The Regents were briefed by executive officers and fundraising volunteers on activities to-date and a future timetable at their meeting last week.

Since last spring, Provost Nancy Cantor has been leading a group that is representative of a number of campus units—faculty and administrators as well as development staff—to identify academic priorities. President Lee C. Bollinger also has been working with an advisory group of alumni and friends of the University.

Deans and others were asked last winter to come up with specifics, and several academic units have devoted faculty retreats to these discussions. Identification of priorities, under broad umbrella themes, will help focus additional discussions next spring on potential dollar goals for the project, which will exceed the then-record $1.4 billion raised in the 1990–97 Campaign for Michigan. That total is the largest ever raised by any public university.

This will be the University’s fourth major campaign, the first occurring in the 1960s and the second in the early 1980s. Records for the first campaign were discarded at its conclusion, the thinking at the time, Bollinger noted in his remarks, being that major campaigns were undertaken only once a century.

A thriving University in need of more money and decreased state funding changed that picture in the 1980s, and the realization that University needs outstripped other sources of funding (state support and sponsored research) prompted that effort.

Cantor

The new “massive enterprise” will demand the efforts of many people, all of whom need to “feel significant devotion to the University and put in the time,” Bollinger said.

Shortly after the close of the 1990–97 campaign, “interested observers” and people on campus were asked how they felt about another one, he explained. “We didn’t want to venture into one unless there was energy and enthusiasm behind it.” The key rule in efforts of this nature, he noted, is that “you must not fail.”

“Everyone felt it was a critical step that needed to be taken, that we must do this. A campaign needs substance and hope to make it happen. We have to get everyone to think about it.”

Cantor noted that “the importance of the campaign can’t be overstated. Our goal is to do what it takes to sustain and grow our success.”

As a “great public university,” the U-M has certain imperatives—exploration, education, opportunity, preservation and character. “These are distinguishing characteristics that we at Michigan should feel very proud of, because we do all of them perhaps better than any other institution. But they are also, frankly, all very difficult to sustain.”

The University also faces cost-drivers—being competitive in terms of innovation, escalating costs of recruiting and retaining talented faculty, and keeping tuition affordable.

While the University must continue to “aggressively pursue” sponsored research, and continue its productive partnership with the state, it also must invest in private support.

In each of the past campaigns, the University has improved advance planning efforts, “and that discipline has helped transform the budget process,” Cantor noted. This has resulted in outright gifts or endowment payouts that account for 5 percent to 10 percent of unit operating revenues. She anticipates that over the next 10 years this share of revenues can double. “Support from individuals, foundations and corporations is the best opportunity for resource expansion.”

Last January, Cantor and Susan K. Feagin, vice president for development, asked deans and directors to submit fundraising goals and priorities. “We did not ask for ‘wish lists,’” Cantor said. “We wanted to initiate a disciplined campaign process right from the start, one that acknowledges the importance of coordinating all the University’s revenue streams—state support, sponsored research and gifts.”

That request resulted in “an evolving matrix of priorities covering the entire campus,” and enabled the establishment of the University Campaign Planning Committee, which “is considering the priorities as a whole, to see the connections among the priorities so we can begin to tell our campaign story.”

Cantor is pleased with the group’s energy and enthusiasm, which she said “reflects the broader understanding among faculty and others of the campaign’s importance to our future.”

“Two groups of cross-cutting priorities have emerged,” she said. The first, thematic priorities—life sciences, information technology, arts and culture, the student experience, globalization—“reflect a sense of where the University wants to be.”

The second identifies proposed uses of campaign money: