"Getting Over the Stereotype That We're Rich"

When Harvard graduates pick up the phone, open their mail, or answer the door, they may very well find a anxious plea from their alma mater.

All this is in the effort to tap Harvard's 234, 136 alumni, including 81,000 graduates of the College, for donations. "We hope every alum will give as much as they can every year and periodically more than that," says Thomas M. Reardon, director of the University development office. With a $650 million annual budget, "Harvard is a large business," says Reardon. "If you look at what Harvard tries to do, we need all the support we can get and we need to get over the stereotype that we're rich. It's costly and time-consuming."

"I'm not one of those people who thinks raising money is tacky," says Fred L. Glimp '50, vice president for alumni affairs. "Alumni feel better about it once they do it, and it's something an institution has to do."

The fundraising game now has higher stakes than ever before, and Harvard won't be left behind in the nationwide race for donations. Forty universities across the country are pushing to raise more than $1 million each, amounting to a combined goal of nearly $7 billion. Stanford University will soon launch the biggest drive ever--to raise $1 billion. In December 1984, Harvard wrapped up its largest campaign by raising $360 million for the College and public policy programs alone. The country's richest school also raked in more contribution dollars--$145 million from individual donors and corporations--than any other university in the nation, according to the latest tally by the Council for Financial Aid to Education.

"Giving used to be a once in a lifetime thing; cycles are going to be shorter," says Reardon. Harvard's last major campaign before the recent five-year drive was in 1956; Reardon predicts that "it is not seriously out of proportion" to assume that the next fundraiser will come in 10 years.

Although the almost $4 billion endowment is soaring at an unprecedented pace--about $100 million a month--fundraising and tuition have had to bear a higher burden in bankrolling the University's costs. While the endowment funded 22 percent of the budget 10 years ago, its share slid to a low of 18 percent last year. At the same time, fundraising has had to cover 3 percent more than its 15 percent share a decade ago, and tuition's share has jumped 6 percent to a 33 percent rate last year.

"The endowment was never intended to provide a majority of funding for the institution," says Reardon. "If the purpose of the endowment is to provide a stable base for the University to grow on for the future, then we cannot raise the endowment's [share of the budget] to meet growing operating costs."

"For the College to grow in a certain area, we have to be able to raise more money. It can not come through the endowment."

The development office, Harvard's central fundraising office, spearheads the money-soliciting effort for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences with a 140-member operation in Holyoke Center. However, the money-raising push extends far beyond the banks of the Charles.

With a nationwide network of 4000 volunteers, the development office has kept in contact with 90 percent of the best Campaign solicitors, says Reardon. Their ranks were augmented by "new, strong people uncovered by the Campaign who emerged through exercise," he adds.

The number of alumni donors, which had been "disappointing in the past," found a "broader basis for support" as it hopped from a 35 percent participation rate to a 60 percent high during the Campaign, says Reardon.

To keep track of these efforts Harvard spent $1.5 million this year on the College Fund. Although "major gifts," which amount to more than two-thirds of total donations, are cheap to get since they usually involve one donor's decision to give, the thousands of smaller alumni gifts in the annual drives cost the development office much more for solicitation efforts, says Reardon. And the cost of raising money is up.

Before the Campaign, when the Fund cost only $900,000 to run, it only raised $7 million. Now the Fund has set "a realistic and ambitious goal" of $17.3 million in the first major drive after the five-year Campaign, says Henry G. Van der Eb '42, Fund chairman. The Fund has so far raked in $16.5 million toward its goal.

But when the Fund structure revved up after its five-year hiatus, administrative problems led it into a boggling cross-over with other branches of the development office. The same alumni would be asked to cough up money for fair old Harvard by many different callers for many different reasons--for their membership in a class, their hometown, their area of interest, and their children now attending Harvard. "If the annual and major gift [fundraisers] take separate tracks, they arrive on the same doorstep simultaneously," says Reardon.

Then came more confusion. William R. Fitzsimmons '67, director of the College Fund, decided to leave the millions behind and become dean of admissions this spring.

So the development office retired Fitzsimmons' job, as well as the directorship of the capital (major gift) fund drive, now held by William Boardman. The two posts and departments will be combined under the tutelage of Richard Boardman, the new executive director of the College Fund. Now development officers can "track a person and share information for both the annual and major gift fund drives," says Reardon.

At the same time the office contracts internally, it will expand into the greater Harvard community by stepping up aid to the financially struggling graduate schools. Since each graduate school is responsible for soliciting its own donations, a system known as "every tub on its own bottom," the schools with the richest alumni roll in the money, while the poorest schools struggle with debt. While the Medical School, the richest graduate school, will mount a $200 million fund drive this summer, the Divinity and Design Schools are trying to stay out of the debt that they suffered last year.

The central development office orchestrates a system of advising to bolster the poorer schools' fundraising efforts, which will now be headed by William Boardman. The advisors will attempt to enlarge the poorer schools' donor constituencies and provide administrative help, Reardon says.

William Boardman "knows alumni, knows the University, and will build an outreach for those [poorer] schools that have got to develop their own constituency beyond alumni," says Reardon. "He will bring central expertise to deal with specific programs."

The reorganized development office is also expected to solicit donations for Harvard's sore spots. Major renovations to the Radcliffe Quad houses have yet to be completed, and the University is already $780 million in hock for the fix-up job. But gifts to academic programs are more appealing; no one has lent a name and the necessary $7 to $10 million to renovate the last unnamed upperclass residence, North House.

"When people give large amounts of money they want to affect the education program, so they give less money to anything else," says Reardon. "They don't show an interest in bricks and mortar."

The development office is now scrambling to find the right donor. The undying fame of getting one's name on a house, "isn't going to do it by itself," says Reardon. The University's top fundraiser says he hopes that alumni will "sense this real opportunity to bring that cluster of houses into the programs and educational opportunities all other houses have."

Corporations are "slowly" beginning to recognize that "space and equipment" are important to education and will increasingly beef up the University's building maintenance funds, says Reardon. Last year the Faculty of Arts and Sciences ran a $15 million budget and borrowed $140 million in December to pay for lab and Quad renovations.

University administrators have no qualms about hitting up the "most generous benefactors" for a steeped-up donation." Besides lab and Quad renovation, the current priorities for fundraising, which are also the pet problems of Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence, are graduate education, junior faculty development and international studies.