A stuffed elephant, a gate, a set of chapel chimes - these are just some of the creative donations Tufts has received since it was founded 150 years ago. Not all gifts to the University are this creative and few are given without something expected in return.
Institutions across the country have experienced a recent trend toward restricted donations - gifts that come with strings attached. Though such donations have caused conflict at some universities, Tufts administrators say that there is often a "convergence of opinion" between the University and its donors.
The Tufts Tomorrow Campaign is in its final year, launched in 1995 to strengthen the endowment. As of Dec. 31, 2001, Tufts Tomorrow had reached 96.6 percent of its $600 million goal, with six months remaining in the Campaign. In a message on the Tufts Tomorrow Campaign website, President Bacow called it "the most ambitious campaign in Tufts University History." Funds raised have been directed at increasing scholarship aid, improving teaching, learning, and research facilities, endowing professorships, and strengthening various programs.
The Campaign has received 31 percent of its gifts from alumni, 23 from foundations, and 17 percent from corporations. Other donors have included friends, parents, and estates.
Restricted donations are on the rise nationwide, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 1999. On average, for every unrestricted dollar donated in 1998, institutions received $3.88 in restricted gifts. This contrasts with a 3:1 ratio in 1996.
Tufts public relations specialist Craig Lemoult explained the confidentiality that surrounds donations to the University.
"People choose to give to the University in a variety of ways, but due to our responsibility to respect their privacy we can not comment about specific stipulations or conditions on gifts unless authorized by the donor," Lemoult said.
Tufts Provost Sol Gittleman said that the University has not experienced complications with restricted gifts. While the delay in the groundbreaking of the music building was rumored to be a result of a donor's requirement that it be centrally located on campus, Gittleman said that this is not the case. Even before the donation was made over two years ago, administrators had eyed its proposed site at the corner of Packard Ave. and Professors Row as a key location at the entrance to the campus, Gittleman said. He added that having the public attend performances at such a prime location is "a positive idea," and that the supposed requirement made by the donor was actually "a convergence of opinion... the donor wants a building on a good spot and we wanted a good building on that spot."
Gittleman said that while "Donors can have strings attached," the University is cautious to accept restricted donations.
"We are very careful, we know about strings," he said. "The University will make the donor feel as good as possible about giving the money. You try to make the donor happy, but only to a certain point."
When donations are made for specific building projects, Gittleman said that donors do not get to choose the location.
"They can recommend, but we pick," he said.
Gittleman referred to both the Olin Building for Language and Cultural Studies and Aidekman Arts Center as buildings for which the locations were chosen and later revealed to donors. "We gave the Olin people the best spot on campus," he said.
The number of corporately endowed chairs is also growing nationwide, and some universities such as MIT have many, according to Gittleman. Corporations sometimes require a say in the placement of a chair, a stipulation accepted by some universities and rejected by others.
"I wish we had a truckload of corporate chairs... and if we did, we would pick the holder," Gittleman said, emphasizing that Tufts does not allow a corporation to choose the faculty member to fill the chair.
"It's nice if the holder of the chair cultivates the donor," Gittleman added. Sometimes a faculty member will be selected to hold the chair, while at other times the Dean, the department, and a committee will conduct a search outside of the University community, he said.
He added that in the case of privately endowed chairs, a family member is sometimes allowed to sit on the committee that chooses the person to fill it.
In order to endow a Tufts chair, donors must contribute at least $1.5 million, "with the return of that money offsetting the salary of the faculty member who holds the
chair," said Siobhan Houton, associate director of public relations in the Office of the Senior Vice President.
Other universities similarly do not allow corporations to choose the people who fill chairs. In the late-1990s the University of Washington passed up a $2.5 million United Parcel Service endowment for a chair in occupational orthopedics. The company, which had received many workers' compensation claims, specified that professor Stanley J. Bigos fill the position because of his experience in the area. The university said that it would not allow UPS to choose the chair and therefore lost the company's significant offer.
In other cases, institutions have accepted endowed chairs even when the donor has made specifications for the holder. Portland State University decided in 1998 to accept a $750,000 donation from the Turkish government that endowed a chair in Turkish political economics. The donation required that the person appointed to the position not only have published works "based upon extensive utilization of archives and libraries in Turkey," but that they also "maintain close and cordial relations with academic circles in Turkey," the Chronicle of Higher Education reported. The arrangement was questioned as a tactic to influence scholars to support Turkey's view of historical events.
Some argue that corporate gifts with stipulations are undesirable because not all departments benefit equally from such restricted giving. Donations tend to support departments that will conduct research beneficial to the corporations. "The department of Slavic studies and the philosophy department tend not to have major donors throwing money at them," Andrew A Wilcox, president of the University of Wisconsin Foundation, told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1998.
At some universities private donors have withdrawn gifts when stipulations have not been met. In 1997, writer and AIDS activist Larry Kramer withdrew an estimated $5 million donation to Yale when officials said that gay and lesbian studies did not call for a tenured faculty position, as he had requested. The University offered to use the funds to buy rare books by gay and lesbian writers or to support visiting professors, but Kramer rejected these options.
Tufts is reportedly the only Boston-area institution to have increased its endowment despite the recession, with a 4.9 percent increase over the 2001 fiscal year. This contrasts with the 27.2 percent decrease in gifts to Boston University during the year. Many other universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and Brown also fared losses.
Harvard, America's most well-endowed college, saw its endowment drop
$900 million to $18.3 billion within a year, according to The New York Times. The drop was greater than Tufts' entire endowment.
Sizable donations made over the last three years include Bernard Gordon's $20 million grant to the School of Engineering, made in Nov. 1999, and eBay founder and alum Pierre Omidyar's $10 million gift in 2000. Gordon's, the largest gift in Tufts history, is funding a series of mandatory workshops and programs aimed at promoting communication and leadership skills for engineering students. Omidyar pledged to give the $10 million over a period of five years to the University College of Citizenship and Public Service, in part to fund the Omidyar scholars program.
A Million Dollar Challenge to Tufts in honor of its sesquicentennial year will enhance donations made by both new and previous donors. An anonymous donor has pledged $150 for every new or increased gift made to the Tufts Fund this year, resulting in a maximum $1 million donation. A 'new gift' is defined as any contribution made during the 2001-2002 fiscal year - July 1, 2001 to June 30, 2002 - by a donor who did not give to the Tufts Fund last fiscal year. The donor may, however, have given to other University establishments such as sports teams or class funds. An 'increased gift' is any gift of a greater amount than the donor's gift last year.
"In a nutshell, if you give $1 to Tufts this year, and didn't give last year, you're actually giving $151," Lemoult said.
