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Donors to Colleges Know Their Gifts Don't Supplant State Funding

Paul R. Shelly

Director of Communications

Asbury Park Press

September 22, 2006

At a time when some state leaders are wondering openly about whether New Jersey's institutions, including colleges and universities, are doing their jobs well, a recent pattern of extraordinary gifts from individuals and families should be considered one very important benchmark of accountability and success.

Over the past year, four of the nine New Jersey state colleges and universities that compose our Association have received their largest single donations ever.

In each case, these examples of extreme generosity came from an individual or family with deep connections to the institutions.

These major gift donors include industrialists, academics, real estate developers, and scientists.  Some, but not all, are people of extraordinary wealth.  What all the individuals on this evolving honor roll have in common is a vision and a special place in their hearts for a New Jersey public institution of higher education that they have come to know well.

There is more good news.  Major gifts to institutions, plus a track record of meeting donors' goals, are key elements in a formula for getting more donations from new sources.  There can be a snowball effect.  That is what happened with Rowan University in 1992 when Henry and Betty Rowan presented a jaw-dropping $100 million gift.  The Rowan gift, one of the largest in the history of American higher education, helped the University build a new future while also attracting other large gifts.

Rowan University, along with Kean University, Richard Stockton College, Thomas Edison State College, and William Paterson University, have also been busy raising funds lately.  Collectively, they have raised tens of millions of dollars over the past several years.

People of vision and experience managing their own investments, and who give unselfishly to state colleges and universities, no doubt require a high degree of confidence that their special gift will be well tended and wisely spent.  They trust that their goals will be met, and they need assurance that their funds will not simply be used to offset shortfalls in state appropriations for general operational costs.

Sometimes, those probing how these institutions spend their money initially have trouble understanding the institutions' unwavering commitment to donor expectations.  College officials often get asked why cuts to higher education cannot jut be met with incoming philanthropic dollars.

The answer is clear.  Doing so would put institutions on a slippery sloe that would result in an abrupt end to private giving.  Core institutional goals - access, affordability and capacity - really must be supported by state funds, or by default, student tuition and fees.  Private giving can supplement, but not substitute for, public funding.

Some have asked me if this year's big cuts to higher education are going to generate public sympathy for higher education that will make it easier for state universities to obtain major gifts.  I say no.  Even donors of generous spirit do not want to give if they believe they are substituting state revenues.  They are also not willing to prop up a public enterprise treated by the state as a low spending priority.

Colleges, unfairly, get accused of being elitist when gifts may create new margins of excellence while overall affordability and capacity are constrained by decreased state investment.

In fact, praise for state colleges' remarkable successes at raising funds to excel in new fields serving the public good is far too faintly and infrequently heard.  Less than 20 years ago, a million-dollar gift to a New Jersey state college or university was unheard of.  Today it is not quite astonishing.

Four record-setting gifts this past year establish a striking pattern.  The gifts call our attention to an expanding circle of visionaries with the desire and the means to help New Jersey state colleges and universities in a big way and who trust those institutions to deliver on promises.