Losing Steam

What was once feverish giving to the $350 million Harvard Campaign has slowed markedly in the last six months, and that fundraising problem helps explain why the Faculty will be at least a month late in announcing next year's tuition.

Cash gifts made almost 15 percent of the Faculty's $170 million budget last year, with interest from the endowment--which is also boosted by the campaign--filling another 26 percent of the budget.

All in all, any shortcoming in giving poses a direct threat to the Faculty's budget and as the Campaign started to lose steam this year the Faculty had to rework its budget.

The Campaign currently stands at just over $275 million, $75 million short of its goal with nine months left. The Faculty was counting on the capital drive raising $84 million strictly for the Faculty's use as endowment money to draw interest on.

Associate Dean Melissa D. Gerrity says the actual cash has come in too slowly, and the Faculty will probably have no more than $75 million in campaign generated cash when the new fiscal year starts on June 30.

Obviously, if there's a cash shortfall, the most convenient way to make it up is raising tuition. But although the Corporation failed to announce a 1984-5 tuition figure in early February, when it traditionally does. Harvard's seven-man governing body did give Gerrity an undisclosed ceiling figure for how much tuition can raise.

Both Gerrity and Financial Vice President Thomas O'Brien have said that they hope to hold the tuition increase to no more than seven percent over this year's $13,150 level. If the Campaign fails to deliver enough to allow a $14,000 tuition, Gerrity says the options are either to cut services or borrow from the University.

"Originally we were all a little more optimistic that the payments [on Campaign pledges] would be coming in faster than they are," says O'Brien.

In July, 1982, according to the most recent figures available, $250 million had been pledged to the Campaign, but Harvard only had $155 million in hand. Campaign spokesman Joseph Carr says the ratio has changed little--two-thirds of the money pledged has actually been turned in.

Getting donors to pay up after they've promised large sums of money can be a tricky, long-term proposition, say fundraisers at other Ivy League schools. Dartmouth finished up a five- year fund drive in 1982 with $24 million more than the $180 million it had sought--but even now 15 months after the end of the drive, less than $170 million of the total is actually in, according to Clifford L. Jordan, associate director of development at Dartmouth.

Princeton's ongoing $330 million campaign, which runs through the end of 1986, raised $194 million in pledges by the end of January, but again, no more that three-quarters of that total has actually been paid up, says Princeton development director George F. Schmucki, Stanford's $300 million drive in the 1970s just made its goal in 1977, but when the campaign ended, $54 million of pledges remained to be collected.

Dartmouth's Jordan says that the problems of collection arise from two groups of factors.

Many pledges, and especially the largest gifts, are paid back in installments over five-year periods, and Jordan says Dartmouth found that up to four percent of donors--but not necessarily four percent of the total pledges-will fail to honortheir pledges, either because they pass away, see the value of securities pledged to the University drop, or "get mad at the institution because it rejected their son or daughter or whatever and say. 'The hall with this."

Most donors who fall to make good fall into the $1500 to $10,000 gift bracket--the group that "is stretching to make a big gift and can't necessarily cover it if something goes wrong," Jordan says.

But officials in the Ivies and at Stanford don't report any need to send around collection crews.

"The bottom line is that, unless there's something very amiss, you're going to bring in whatever you've got shown in the total, unless you've got some pretty flaky stuff pledged. But that doesn't happen. I don't think, in the Ivies," says Jordon.

Princeton, in fact, tries to be conservative in assessing how much alumni can give. Although it recently boosted its goal from $275 million, to raise cash for a new molecular biology building and staff. Schmucki says "we do not go out ahead of time and make any commitments before we've received gifts. We don't have a situation where we have budgeted items for which we do not have the resources."

Although Princeton set many of the same goals Harvard has in its campaign--improving computer services and increasing money available for scholarships and faculty salaries--the University has made no promises ahead of time, Schmucki says.

To push the Harvard Campaign's goal over the top, a group--including the 23 members of the Campaign's executive committee and four other alumni-established a $25 millin "challenge fend" in January.

The group will match every two dollars of new or increased alumni giving with one dollar or its own-meaning that alumni have to come up with another $50 million to send the Campaign to its goal