Chicago, Illinois -- As news of Harvey Plotnick’s multi-million-dollar business deal hit the papers here in 1986, his colleagues teased him that any day, the fund raisers at his alma mater would be calling on him for a donation.
“They won’t,” the 1963 University of Chicago graduate recalls telling his friends. And they didn’t.
Mr. Plotnick, now chairman of the university’s $500-million Campaign for the Next Century and a university trustee, wouldn’t be so blase if the university committed such an oversight today.
As never before, the University of Chicago gives fund raising a high priority.
Its new president, Hugo F. Sonnenschein, is considered a more enthusiastic fund raiser than was his predecessor, Hanna Holborn Gray.
Barely a year into his tenure, Mr. Sonnenschein replaced the vice-president for development with a popular, in-house candidate in May. She, along with the university’s new provost, has begun reshaping the fund-raising organization to involve deans and department heads more actively in soliciting gifts.
“A dean is more likely to be compelling” in encouraging a gift than would be a development officer, says Geoffrey Stone, the provost who in his previous position as dean of the law school raised a record $40-million for the school over six years.
To foster a sense of class unity, Chicago has redesigned its reunions along traditional lines to encourage more alumni to attend at five-year intervals. Along with the regular reunion offerings, the university is using such events to promote the notion of “reunion giving.”
It has also instituted a “class agent” system involving class members as volunteer fund raisers for the annual drive of the College, the undergraduate division, to create “more of a personal connection,” according to Randy Holgate, the new vice-president for development and alumni relations.
Ms. Holgate is pressing her staff to become more aggressive about finding potential donors for the College and the university’s 10 graduate divisions and professional schools.
No longer, she says, can the university depend so heavily on support from Chicago-area foundations and families that have traditionally helped the institution.
Moreover, successful business executives like Mr. Plotnick -- formerly president of Contemporary Books and now chief executive officer at Paradigm Holdings Inc., which owns educational and multimedia companies -- have been recruited to help steer the university’s fund-raising efforts.
“This is no longer seen as dirty work,” says Mr. Plotnick, who now routinely writes five-digit checks to the annual fund and has pledged more than a half-million dollars for scholarships.
While many of the steps Chicago has taken to improve fund raising might seem old hat for a prestigious, private, research university, they mark a new direction for this 103-year-old institution, which boasts faculty or alumni connections to 64 Nobel Prize winners. Its stature aside, the University of Chicago has never been an exemplar of fund-raising prowess.
University leaders say the failings are linked to the institution’s unique strengths.
For one, the university, which describes itself as “the teacher of teachers,” has many graduates who do not work in lucrative professions. According to a survey that the university conducted this year, 18 of the top 25 employers of its graduates are colleges and universities.
Also, say university officials, its student body has traditionally been drawn from less-wealthy families than those supplying many of its peer institutions. That remains true today. Last year, 55 per cent of all Chicago undergraduates received financial aid, compared with 40, 42, and 44 per cent for Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard Universities, respectively.
Chicago does have sports teams and clubs that create loyalties and memories that other institutions routinely capitalize upon when trying to bond with their graduates. But alumni leaders say Chicago’s students, as a group, have tended to place more emphasis on their studies than on extracurricular activities.
“Chicago students, mainly, are not joiners,” says Bill Nauman of Tulsa, past president of the alumni association. The rigors of the academic program and the independent nature of the student who typically chooses Chicago contribute to that, he says. “A lot of students don’t even live in dormitories,” and the curriculum allows for diverse paths of study, says Mr. Nauman, who received his master’s in business administration from Chicago in 1975. “It makes it difficult for bonding to occur.”
Chicago has long celebrated the image of its students as smart, independent, and perhaps a little idiosyncratic. Its latest viewbook features this quotation from the movie director Mike Nichols, who attended in the early 1950’s but didn’t graduate: “Everybody was strange at the University of Chicago. It was paradise.”
Still, the combination of serious- and independent-minded students and the low priority on extracurricular life creates, in Mr. Plotnick’s words, “special problems in fund raising.”
Those problems, coupled with financial pressures facing the university, make the advances in fund raising critical. Last year the university ran a deficit of about $15-million in a budget of $714-million. Mr. Sonnenschein has announced plans to cut $10-million in administrative costs from the budget within four years. While cost cutting and improved efficiency will help, university leaders say the focus on fund raising of the past few years must become permanent.
Those charged with the duty say they are up to the challenge. In addition to impending changes in the development office and the new emphasis on reunions, Ms. Holgate notes that the university has already made changes to improve its communications with alumni.
At the prodding of the Alumni Association, The University of Chicago Magazine switched from a quarterly to a bi-monthly publishing schedule in late 1990. The development office has also begun more actively to market planned giving and to solicit corporations for donations.
More importantly, university officials have in Mr. Sonnenschein a president who apparently relishes fund raising. To many, the contrast with Ms. Gray is striking.
“Hugo has a real enthusiasm for fund raising,” says Howard G. Krane, chairman of the Board of Trustees. “I don’t know what her enthusiasm was.”
Another trustee, asking not to be identified, put it more bluntly. “Hanna Gray never opened her house up once for fund raising,” he says. “Hanna just wasn’t interested in fund raising. It just wasn’t her style.”
Many here are heartened by the early success of the campaign. With more than $415-million in hand, the university has achieved more than 80 per cent of its goal, with nearly two years to go. Yet at a time when several of its peer institutions are conducting or have concluded drives for $1-billion or more, some here question whether Chicago has reason to crow, or simply set its sights too low.
Ms. Holgate says university leaders will decide by December whether to raise the goal.
Despite its attempts to reach out more to graduates, alumni participation in giving is still lower than that at comparable institutions. Among undergraduates, Chicago’s participation rate was 35 per cent versus 52, 56, and 49 per cent for Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities, respectively. But the figure is substantially better than both the 18-per-cent rate Ms. Holgate found when she joined the staff 15 years ago and the 26-per-cent average for all the country’s colleges and universities.
As with the overall fund-raising effort, university leaders are trying to view their glass as half full. The participation rate, says Mr. Krane, the trustee chairman, illustrates “the opportunities we have.”
