Harvard's Little Fund-Raising Structure

The major innovation of this drive, in Pusey's view, was the frankness with which it expressed the College's backlog of needs. The fact that it was successful allowed Princeton and other colleges to begin major capital campaigns.

Harvard is the richest private University in the nation. Two years ago, its endowment passed $1 billion, and each year it runs a budget of more than $130 million. But if Harvard is big and rich now, it will be bigger and richer ten years from now: the University continues to seek new financial support at an astounding pace. Just last winter President Pusey, in his annual report, listed $160 million of capital needs currently being sought.

Almost every part of the University is looking for large sums of new money. Pusey's list included the School of Design ($11.6 million), the School of Public Health ($7.4 million), the Business School ($6 million), the Divinity School ($7 million), the Law School ($15 million), the School of Education ($5 million), the School of Dental Medicine ($4 million), and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences ($49 million for the Program for Harvard Science). Pusey's total of $160 million of new needs was, if anything, conservative. There are ventures to which the University has already made commitments that will demand new money but Pusey did not bother to include some of these. (The most prominent omission from his list was the University's participation in the development of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library site, a job that will probably cost from $12 to $16 million.)

Raising so much money is not easy, and the University has not left its capital campaigns to chance. President Pusey has developed an elaborate fund-raising system to obtain new support. The whole operation centers in the office of James R. Reynolds, Assistant to the President for Development and known informally as the "Grand Old Man of the business."

When Reynolds first became the development officer in 1949, fundraising was far more centralized than it is now. He himself set up and directed the highly successful Program for Harvard College, which at one point included 5000 Harvard men in either committee work or soliciting. From 1956 through 1959, the drive reached its $82.5 million goal, elicited contributions from over 60 per cent of the College's alumni, and then exceeded its goal by about $10 million during the next year.

Now, Reynolds' office does not serve as a fund-raising unit itself. Instead, it coordinates and advises the development offices in the various graduate schools in the University. Harvard fund-raising is decentralized, unlike fund-raising at many other institutions (Columbia, for example, now has one large, university-wide campaign). Reynolds involves himself in a school's individual capital campaign to the extent that it must extend beyond its natural constituency (alumni of the school and interested friends). Reynolds has the President's authority to give a dean the go-ahead signal on soliciting an important individual or corporation, and he and Pusey frequently prevent overlapping requests. "We must protect our donors from multiple assaults," says Pusey.

Otherwise, nothing forces the individual development offices to come to Reynolds, and they do so only when he can be helpful, which is likely to be very often. His office contains files on individuals, corporations, and foundations--what they have given, what they are interested in, who may be influential in a company. Reynolds stays in contact with the general chairmen of drives, attends their executive committee meetings when asked, and handles many administrative details.

Reynolds' advice is basic to the planning of a drive. A dean of a faculty may work out what his needs are, for example, and then review the projected goal with the President and the Fellows, who may say the total is too high. At this point, Reynolds enters the picture to take a look at the school's possibilities for raising the money. He knows the fund-raisers' code: one third of a campaign will come from 10 gifts, one third from 100 to 200 gifts, and the remaining third from the rest. The first important question centers, then, on the likelihood that 10 contributors will meet one third of the drive's goal.

Reynolds will look at the school's alumni, see what foundations are interested in the school's program, and calculate what might be expected from corporations. He will also see if any federal money is available by checking with Charles P. Whitlock, Assistant to the President for Civic and Governmental Affairs. It is his task to decide what potential there is for winning federal grants. In light of all this information, Reynolds, the Corporation, and the graduate school will be able to see how realistic the planned goal is.

All questions are not black and white, however. As government programs become more general, for example, there is competition between different Harvard schools for federal money. Under the Higher Education Facilities Act, to take one federal program, five schools wished to apply for a grant, President Pusey, on the basis of which school needs the money most and which has the best possibility of winning it, decides the priorities.

To Reynolds, "no government money is a gift." Harvard does not solicit the government the way it does the private sector. When a Harvard school wins a federal grant under the Higher Education Facilities Act to build classrooms, the money does not go through the gift office. It does, however, reduce the goal which a drive must achieve.

The University has begun to look increasingly towards corporations for contributions, and three years ago Reynolds' office branched out by including a special Corporations Planning Officer, William S. Olney. He keeps careful records of corporate gifts, maintains contacts between the corporation and Harvard, and sees if Harvard graduates are on a corporation's board of directors.

Corporate giving did not begin until the 1950's, after the courts ruled in the A. P. Smith case of 1954 that it was legal for a corporation to give profits away for philanthropic purposes. Since then, corporate gifts to Harvard have grown from nothing to almost $5 million last year, or 11.5 per cent of all gifts and bequests.

The Harvard Corporation accepts, by vote, every gift and bequest. When it meets, the Corporation is presented with a list of gifts and their purposes. The Corporation must approve the terms, and occasionally someone might put restrictions on a gift with which the Corporation could not agree. For example, a case actually occurred where a man offered to set up a scholarship for boys by a certain surname from a small town. The scholarship would obviously serve no one but his own family.

If, on the other hand, a scholarship was offered for only whites, or only Muslims, the Corporation in all likelihood would accept it on the grounds that there would always be enough whites, or Muslims, in the University to avoid its becoming designated for specific individuals. The Corporation, in this case, might also decide not to give the scholarship to freshmen so that the scholarship qualifications could not cause discrimination in admissions.

Besides accepting gifts, the President and Corporation play several roles in fund-raising: as the highest budgetary authority of the University, they determine what areas deserve the priority of a formal drive, what will be its goals, and who should head the campaign. Individuals on the Corporation often serve on campaign committees. The President, of course, is the University's best solicitor; his development assistants try to protect him for that very reason. When it is important, he will talk with the potential donor. The Development Office may ask him perhaps 10 times a year to speak to a party, and Pusey on his own initiative may talk to a dozen people about specific needs. Anyone contributing over $1000 to the University automatically receives a letter from the President.

When a drive begins to take shape in a development office, it is Pusey who must persuade an alumni leader to become the general chairman, find members for the executive committee, and spend some time with them so that they know the University is interested.

Pusey has initiated two major changes in the nature of Harvard fund-raising since he became President in 1953. First was the enormity of the $82.5 million Program for Harvard College. "It took a lot of persuading to convince people that the goal was realistic," he recalls. "Nowhere near that much had been raised before." The major innovation of this drive, in Pusey's view, was the frankness with which it expressed the College's backlog of needs. The fact that it was successful allowed Princeton and other colleges to begin major capital campaigns.

Scarcely had the Program for Harvard College ended, however, when the $58-million Program for Harvard Medicine began. As with the College drive, it was understood that this campaign would have priority over other efforts. Alumni work and publicity centered on the medical drive, while other faculties continued to find funds quietly.

"At the completion of the Program for Harvard Medicine," says Pusey, "I asked each dean to state his school's capital needs for the next 10 years. It showed me that another major program would not be practical and would tend to create a mood of continual hopelessness." He also felt that in the face of so many demands, he would have a hard time justifying an other single central effort.

At that point; Pusey made his second major change and announced that he did not want to see another single campaign dominate the University. The new approach was to move ahead on all fronts. The result is the long list of individual capital drives, whose total is $160 million. Also, each school has its own annual giving program. These campaigns, which include the College Fund, are for unrestricted gifts with the exception of scholarships.

A new step this year was Pusey's requirement that the head of the Harvard schools must put down the operating and capital budget with a 10-year perspective, explaining the amount of money involved and from where it will come. Pusey looks to the government as the inevitable source for the ever-increasing operational costs and capital needs.

He considers it one of his major tasks to exert his influence upon officials who will be setting legislative policy on education. "To base grants on just a per-capita basis would be disastrous to Harvard," he says. "People must recognize that it costs more to educate a specialist or graduate student than an undergraduate, just as a senior is more expensive than a freshman."