When the University kicked off its first Capital Campaign in 1993, there was a serious conversation among senior administrators about the future. With only about 15 percent of the University's operating budget coming from state appropriations and the shadow of an already troubled economy looming, the University had to change its method of operation and look increasingly to private gifts to make up for this lack of funding.
According to Julian Bivins, assistant vice president for advancement services in the development office, the University had to reduce its budget due to a lack of funding beginning in 1993. The funds appropriated to the University from the Commonwealth were not enough to fully support its growing budget, prompting concern and a need for solutions at the University.
A new way to pay
The decreasing reliance of the University on state appropriations has its base in a number of national trends that have been taking place in public education since the 1980s.
David Breneman, director of the master's program in public policy and an expert on economics in education, said other claims on state revenues have directed funds away from public institutions of higher education.
"[Public universities] used to be avid low-tuition advocates," Breneman said. "They really supported keeping tuition as low as humanly possible. And that's changed. They've thrown in the towel and said the states aren't going to keep paying their share, so we've got to replace it with something."
During the first Capital Campaign, the University sought to replace most of that share not only with tuition but also with fundraising dollars. This shift from a dependence primarily on state funds to a growing interest in the potential for private funds marked a change in the way in which public universities did business, according to Breneman.
"There used to be an unwritten understanding that state universities would be the recipients of state support," Breneman said.
Now, with most public institutions attempting to raise private funds, Breneman said entrepreneurial behavior tends to be expected from most collegiate leaders.
According to Bivins, there was always an implicit expectation that a president of a public university would be the chief advancement officer. This role was made much more explicit with the launch of the first Capital Campaign, something new for public institutions, Bivins said.
"President [John T. Casteen, III] is the leader of an organization that has a budget of $2.3 billion," Bivins said.
This shift in responsibility extended to the deans of all of the University's schools, according to Breneman, who just stepped down from his role as dean of the Education School.
"Deans didn't use to fundraise," Breneman said. "All of us, every school here and every dean here, has a price on their head. We've all got our part of the goal ... without the deans, you'd never meet these big goals."
According to Breneman, the majority of Capital Campaign fundraising is based in the individual schools at the University. With a goal of $500 million, the College of Arts & Sciences, for example, has the largest goal of all of the schools by a significant margin. Breneman said each of the schools reports monthly to the administration.
"If you're falling behind your goal, that's not a good thing for one's career," Breneman said.
Provost Arthur Garson, Jr., formerly the interim Medical School dean, was touted as an example of a successful fundraising dean.
"I committed from the get-go to dedicate 40 percent of my time to fundraising," Garson said.
Yet he added that the job of fundraising constituted an additional duty in an already busy job.
"When I committed to doing 40 percent of my time fundraising, that really constituted 40 percent of 140 because you cannot ignore anything else."
Breneman, however, said a number of dean-related duties now have to be delegated in order to keep the University's schools up and running.
"What it has forced deans to do, just as it forced presidents some years ago to do, is you tend to push down some of the day-to-day academic work to associate deans and department chairs," Breneman said.
According to Breneman, the responsibilities of fundraising coupled with the changing face of public education have fundamentally changed the role of dean over the past two decades.
"A person who might have been a successful dean 20 years ago, because that person had no interest in and didn't want to do fundraising, would probably not be a successful dean today," Breneman said. "You've got to be willing. Not everybody likes to raise money."
New challenges
With the launch of the public phase of the second Capital Campaign in October 2006, the University and its administration have taken a different approach to fundraising from the first Capital Campaign.
"Our institution has the ability to be not just a good university, but among one of the great universities," Bivins said. "[We are] realizing that the Commonwealth is going to have some base of support, but that base of support is not going to allow us to be the kind of organization that we can be."
Even though state appropriations have fallen to comprise only 8.5 percent of the University's current operating budget, the second Capital Campaign has attracted a number of private donors seeking to add something to the University.
"The difficulty with raising private funds ... is that the big money tends to come in for things where you start something new," Breneman said, pointing to the newly introduced Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy as an example. "Those kinds of gifts don't help keep the basic operating budget of the University going. People don't typically give big gifts to fund current operations. In a way, every time a university gets a major gift like that, it takes on a new set of obligations."
According to Breneman and Garson, very few individuals give unrestricted funds to the University. Garson said his experience as interim Medical School dean taught him to share different opportunities with donors, as they are the ones who determine where the money goes.
"If you're going to create priorities of areas that you'd like to grow, it becomes the dean's job to at least present alternatives to donors where hopefully some of the time a donor will be interested in a priority issue they hadn't come to the table thinking about," Garson said.
Garson pointed out that the donation of unrestricted funds is important to the University as they traditionally go toward funding what he calls "the basics," such as faculty hiring and retention.
"Some of the biggest problems the University is going to face with fundraising is to grow and to fund the basics," Garson said. "Those sorts of things that are absolute basics may or may not relate to the flashy huge ideas that get people's attention ... It is our job that we can demonstrate how a donor can make a difference in a basic program."
Students giving back
Students, who have always been at the center of the University's mission, are now being told more and more to give back, according to Alumni Association President Tom Faulders.
"There is a desire to inculcate in the student population to give back," Faulders said.
According to Breneman, this has been the secret of private universities for years.
"If you enroll at Dartmouth or Princeton or a place like that, they're going to be organizing you and talking to you about giving back from the day you get to campus," Breneman said. "In a way, what places like the University of Virginia are doing is playing catch up to the private universities."
Garson made a concrete pledge to encourage his students to donate. He created a program in the Medical School in which he gave five dollars on behalf of every medical student to the Alumni Association for his first three years as dean.
"They got a thank-you letter from the Medical School," Garson said. "I said my wife and I are going to do this for three years, and then we're going to turn around and say, 'Now it's up to you.'"
Lofty goals
Looking toward the future and the end of the second Capital Campaign, University officials are both optimistic and realistic.
After the Board of Visitors recently approved a budget of nearly $2 billion, Bivins said he does not believe the University is wanting, though more funding would always be welcome.
"I don't know necessarily that we have troubles with our regular budget," Bivins said. "Yes, the University could always use more funding because we always have more opportunities than we could possibly sustain with our present cash flow."
Breneman, who was president of Kalamazoo College in Michigan prior to coming to the University, recalled a moment from his tenure at the small private college which reminded him that the job of fundraising is never complete.
"We were doing this campaign, and we were about to finish it," Breneman said. "I woke up one morning and realized, as soon as we finish this one, we're going to start planning the next one. That's just the way the world is. I think that's happening in public universities as well."
Breneman said this trajectory of one fundraising campaign after another is in all likelihood present at the University. He added that such a possibility changes administrative jobs at the University.
"That does alter the nature of the presidency and the nature of the deanships," Breneman said. "There's probably even been more of a change with the deanships than with presidents because presidents, by and large, have been fund-raisers all along."
Garson echoed a similar sentiment as he said he sees the University as a unique place whose bright future may always include fundraising.
Referring to the current Capital Campaign, he said simply, "Three billion is not going to get us to the stars."
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