The Advancement Committee of the University’s Board of Visitors met Thursday to hear a presentation on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — which doubled its endowment in just two years — by Dean Christa Davis Acampora. The Committee also heard a brief report on initiatives tied to the “Honor the Future” campaign and fundraising progress nearly halfway through the fiscal year.
The Advancement Committee is responsible for fundraising campaigns, alumni affairs and public communications. The Committee’s responsibilities also include oversight of University capital campaigns and programs that promote the University publicly and with alumni and donors.
In her presentation, Acampora explained that she accepted the job as dean in 2022 because she saw an opportunity for growth. She tied this to the College Graduate School’s ability to raise a competitive endowment despite some low performance indicators.
“I could observe that our research ranking had been relatively flat, [and] our PhD production had been declining,” Acampora said. “Yet our endowment had been competitive … I saw a real opportunity for success there.”
This led Acampora to center her push for graduate excellence around further growing the endowment. Acampora oversaw the formation of the Graduate Excellence Campaign, which has raised roughly $100 million in commitments in less than two years to increase the College’s competitiveness in attracting graduate school students. This will double the graduate school’s endowment from what it had previously acquired over the course of its 132 year history.
Acampora said that she believes this support for the graduate school is already yielding positive results at all levels, such as in math and science. She cited “cutting edge research” at the College that is taking place in the realm of artificial intelligence, and the University’s ability to attract faculty like Anton Korinek, who was named one of Time’s “100 most influential people in AI” for 2025, as positive signs of growth.
Acampora also said that the philanthropy has brought in “incredible hires” in philosophy, English, media studies and environmental sciences, all of which have graduate programs.
One area where the Graduate School has improved at drawing in students has been in the support package it offers, according to Acampora. The expanded support package was made possible at the time by cutting the number of graduate students by 20 percent.
Vice President for Advancement Mark Luellen praised Acampora in his remarks, for in his view, overcoming serious challenges presented by the lack of awareness in the general public of graduate school needs.
“Fundraising for graduate education is very tough,” Luellen said. “The donors we typically have are people that have been involved at an undergraduate level and are not as aware of the needs and importance of graduate education and fundraising … Christa and her team and [others] have just done an absolutely fabulous job.”
In his own report, Luellen began by sharing details on the “Gratitude Initiative.” The six-month initiative is aimed at conveying thanks to donors of the University's “Honor the Future” campaign, a campaign that raised $6.1 billion for the University from 2019 to June of this year. Among the events held as part of the initiative were an Oct. 11 gala that took place at John Paul Jones arena with roughly 500 attendees and 10 open houses for alumni and donors to see new facilities the campaign funded.
Luellen also noted the work of the communications team, which created a digital impact report for the public and for all 258,000 donors to track the impact of their contributions.
“You can literally go school by school, unit by unit and [look at] the impact of the capital campaign…” Luellen said. “Every school and unit across grounds worked on this report … it's not just numbers, it tells a lot about the Deans’ goals [and] their objectives.”
Luellen also gave updates on regular fundraising efforts, remarking that the University is in a “strong” and “steady” position, having received roughly 200 million dollars in commitments thus far, with the athletics department performing particularly well. Luellen stated that cash flow, the amount of money actually received by the University from what was committed, is also strong, up 12 percent from the University’s five-year average. Luellen indicated that he believes there is more room for growth in both areas in the months to come.
Luellen also noted that 75 percent of staff proposals for donor-funded projects have been accepted by donors, which he believes is a positive sign for the partnership between donors and academic leaders.
Among other projects discussed at the meeting were the University’s new database, built with Salesforce, which will go live in February and consolidate the regular University and U.Va. Health databases into one. Luellen said this will allow for more centralization in the future. He also said that he believes the University has made recent progress in the realm of corporate relations, highlighting vast increases in industry-funded private grants and gifts from industry partners to the University.
The Committee will meet again when the Board reconvenes March 5 and 6.
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