What Does It Cost to Endow a Professorship
And so Y'all WANT TO ENDOW YOUR University
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Baronial 3, 1986
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Section 12 , Folio
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Suppose a prosperous couple wakes upwardly tomorrow itching to make a big donation to the college or university of their pick. (Hey, it happens.) Allow's call these hypothetical people John Q. and Jane Majorgift and assume that, while they doubtless take noble motives for giving that have null to practise with taxes, deep down they also wouldn't listen having their names immortalized by attaching them to a edifice, a room, an endowed faculty chair, a student scholarship, a written report carrel, a library fund or a campus tree. Just before the Majorgifts randomly dispatch their check, or put themselves in the friendly merely firm easily of a university's fund-raising staff, there are a few things they should consider.
First the bad news. Our donors are wise to act now. And then-called ''naming'' gifts are expensive, and similar everything else associated with higher education, the prices are likely to go along going up. Campus buildings that cost $2 million a decade ago now may cost $10 million or more, and to name a building usually requires a gift of l percent of its total price. (When no single gift is large enough, an quondam president, professor or football coach usually gets the laurels.) At major private research institutions - Harvard, Yale, Princeton - the going rate for endowed faculty chairs is at present $1.5 one thousand thousand, and in its upcoming centennial entrada, Stanford will ask $1.half dozen million. This is pregnant because fund-raisers gear up prices based on what institutions like Stanford are doing. Twenty-five years agone, such a chair would probably accept cost $500,000.
According to Burr Gibson, a professional fund-raising consultant with Martz and Lundy of Lyndhurst, Due north.J., chairs now cost more than $1 million at such private schools as Dartmouth, Smith, Vassar and Georgetown. Smaller schools - Washington and Jefferson Higher or Wilkes in Pennsylvania - ask from $500,000 to $750,000. Chairs at pocket-size state colleges and universities are considerably less, simply even there a minimum of $300,000 to $500,000 is mutual present. For case, an endowed professor's chair costs $500,000 at the University of Utah, $350,000 at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
''We raised the price for an endowed chair from $250,000 to $350,000 a couple of years ago,'' says Santa Barbara's chancellor, Robert A. Huttenback. ''Nosotros may heighten it once more.'' MOREOVER, when prices of naming gifts do go up, the modify is not incremental.
The increases are triggered mainly past aggrandizement, only fund-raisers similar to deal in financial ''quanta'' - discrete, large packets of cash - and whole, round numbers. Thus, large jumps are mutual. Before its latest campaign, Emory University in Atlanta asked $25,000 for endowed pupil scholarships. These now toll $50,000. Michigan Country is considering a $1 million increase in its minimum price for an endowed faculty chair (to $2 million).
Now the good news. Within the categories of named gifts - endowed chairs, endowed and nonendowed scholarships, upper-case letter funds (buildings, equipment and operating expenses) - there are many choices, specially among such minor-ticket items as rooms, auditorium seats and books. In curt, ''bargains'' nonetheless exist, and campus immortality is still within the reach of many Americans, including the Majorgifts.
Merely allow'south go out the Majorgifts for the moment and consider a real-life case that illustrates the pleasures and pitfalls of named giving. This one involves a big-fourth dimension giver, but in that location is a lesson here for everyone.
In 1980 Harold Walter Siebens, an entrepreneur in the sale of sporting goods and, later, oil leases, gave $18 million to tiny Buena Vista College in Tempest Lake, Iowa. In render for this and earlier gifts, Buena Vista's grateful administrators gave Mr. Siebens a large measure of campus immortality, attaching his proper name or the proper noun of a Siebens family member to several campus buildings and funds. The Buena Vista campus now contains the Siebens Center (a fieldhouse named for Mr. Siebens's parents, who attended Buena Vista); the Harold Walter Siebens School of Business/Siebens Forum (named for Mr. Siebens himself); the Estelle Siebens Science Center (his wife); the Stewart D. Siebens Computer Center (part of the Schoolhouse of Business, named for ane of Mr. Siebens's two sons); the William West. Siebens American Heritage Lecture Series Endowment (the other son); the Nancy Siebens Binz Edifice Endowment (a daughter); the Mary Jane Siebens Polubiec Scholarship Endowment (a second daughter), and the Gloria Siebens Freund Center for Gratis Enterprise/Internship/Placement Endowment (a tertiary daughter).
A fine tribute to a generous human being. And yet, there is an irony here. With so many things bearing the Siebens name, Buena Vista students avoid confusion past using generic terms - saying, for instance, ''Terminal night we broke into the Science Building and shot off the burn down extinguishers.'' Thus Mr. Siebens may take named himself out of everyday campus parlance. MOST people, of course, practice non give to higher education merely to place their names on campus structures and student lips, or even for a tax suspension. Institutional loyalty, concern for college pedagogy, fifty-fifty sentiment - all are important. But naming is of import likewise. Otherwise why bother with it? Why print glossy brochures listing dollar amounts for various naming opportunities (in fund-raising jargon, ''the price list'')? The answer is that fund-raisers know that naming satisfies that subtle blend of urge and ego that stirs the heart and moves the cheque-writing hand of many potential patrons. And as long equally naming pleases the donor and the gift pleases the college and its students, everyone is happy.
Aye, at that place is the occasional large anonymous gift - such equally the $fifty meg given to the Cornell University Medical College a couple of years ago - but near people want to stand up tall and have their names carved in rock (or contumely). A evolution-office staff member at New York University estimates, for example, that 80 percent of N.Y.U.'s big gifts ($ane million or more than) result in naming.
And why not? Naming is an important office of a fund-raising system that brought a record $6.3 billion to higher instruction concluding yr. Naming is as American as Knuckles, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Charles Stewart Mott Community College, the John Wayne Cancer Clinic, the Jerry Lewis Neuromuscular Research Centre and the Adnan Khashoggi Sports Center.
Viewed in this mode - no apologies, tit for tat, blindside for the buck - it's articulate that Mr. Siebens'southward gifts could take been directed differently. Like the late cancer researcher Seeley J. Mudd, he could have established a fund to finance buildings on several prominent campuses. Or like Nicholas Brownish and William Colgate, he might have gone for the big kahuna: an unabridged institution.
Consider that Harvard University was named for John Harvard, a Charlestown, Mass., government minister, two years afterward its 1636 founding, in appreciation of a donation of $:400 and a 400-volume library. At that place are no more deals like Harvard, of form, and institutional renaming is very rare today, even for the biggest donors.
The tardily Robert Woodruff, a longtime chairman of the lath of Coca-Cola, gave $250 million to Emory Academy during his lifetime. Emory now has Woodruff Scholars, a Robert Woodruff Wellness Sciences Center and a George W. Woodruff Physical Education Center (named for Robert's blood brother). But for all that, it's still called Emory University. THE ULTIMATE naming opportunity, all the same, does exist. Recently there was the example of Dropsie College in Philadelphia, which had been established through the will of a lawyer named Moses Aaron Dropsie 79 years ago and which had lately fallen on hard times. Last month it announced that it would go the Annenberg Research Plant for Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. The new plant, to open in a twelvemonth, is named for Walter H. Annenberg, the publisher and erstwhile Ambassador to United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, who is chairman of the constitute'due south board of trustees and whose private foundation is financing structure of the constitute's new headquarters.
How does all this utilize to the Majorgifts, who after much soul-searching accept decided they tin afford to requite a modest $850,000 to their onetime alma mater? To put it every bit crassly as possible, today's wisdom tells them to spread their wealth for maximum name-recognition yield. For the Majorgifts, evidently, entire buildings are out. With $1 million they could get the South Tower of the Academic Center at George Washington Academy, but that would be a little more they tin spend right at present.
Their donation could pay for a building's operating expenses, only permit's face it, a plaque reading ''Oil and electric made possible by the John Q. and Jane Majorgift Fund'' lacks sex appeal.
They could opt for prestige, sending everything to a height university, but as we've seen, $850,000 won't go them much these days at ''the bigs'' (half an endowed chair at Yale; the Biochemical Analysis Lab at the Tulane Medical Center).
No, our advice to our donating friends is to invest in smaller institutions, student funds -which tin can be had for as little as $three,000 and are by and large available for between $25,000 and $75,000 - and parts of buildings. SPENT prudently, their $850,000 could get the following:
* Ane endowed faculty chair at the University of California at Santa Barbara: $350,000.
* One chair (sitting type, with brass nameplate) in George Washington Academy's Himmelfarb Library: $5,000.
* One endowed lectureship, Johns Hopkins Academy, Baltimore: $25,000.
* Ii scholarships at Garden Metropolis Community Junior College in Kansas: a $3,000 each, $6,000.
* I dart room in the Adnan Khashoggi Sports Middle at American Academy in Washington: $fifty,000.
* Ane patio-terrace in Tulane's Goldring/Woldenberg Hall, New Orleans: $150,000.
* One computer work station, Tulane: $1,000.
* 1 humanities renewal conference, Auburn University, Alabama: $50,000. (Hither is a case where snappy brochure re-create caught Mrs. Majorgift's middle. ''The intellect,'' Auburn's price list says, ''can reach out to the world and complimentary us from the isolation of our own meager selves.'')
* Ane Men'south Varsity Locker Room and the John Q. Majorgift Power Lifting Room, Beloit Higher, Beloit, Wis.: $75,000.
* Two nameplates on the backs of chairs in Catholic University's renovated Nursing School Auditorium in Washington: a $125 each, $250.
* Several specially designed book fund labels (''Through the courtesy of John Q. Majorgift'') for books purchased by any Yale library: $5,000.
* One entrance foyer in Fort Hays State University's renovated Sheridan Coliseum in Hays, Kan.: $100,000.
* I dumbwaiter system, third flooring, aforementioned building: $3,500.
And with all that, the Majorgifts would nonetheless have enough left over for a souvenir piece of the old basketball-court flooring at Beloit ($ane,000), a hefty donation to the ''Endow the Tailback Fund'' at the University of Southern California and a complete collection of Big Eight and Southeastern Conference beer mugs.
Now that's value.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/03/education/so-you-want-to-endow-your-university.html