ACTA's Must-Reads
« Colleges and community service | Main | For students to aim high, colleges must set the standards »
Put up and shut up?
Speaking at a Council for Advancement and Support of Education's conference this week in New York, outgoing Tufts president Larry Bacow told donors that it's time "to change the conversation from 'what donors want to do' to 'how they can help institutions meet their goals'," as The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. In other words, enough with donor ideas, and let's listen to colleges instead.
"How can you help us encourage innovation and foster strong leadership?" he asked the donors. "We need to invite our donors to help us solve our problems."
Come again?
In case Mr. Bacow did not notice, donors have been directing and targeting their gifts with just that goal in mind. Indeed, they are restricting their donations, not to harm institutions, but to help them -- funding, for example, enriching and rigorous programs which introduce students to perspectives they wouldn't otherwise find -- because the colleges aren't doing it themselves.
And surely Mr. Bacow doesn't mean to suggest that donors should hand over their dollars, no strings attached. As Frank Turner, former Yale University provost at the time of the ill-fated Bass gift, well understood: "universities benefit from donor restrictions as well as gifts. The donation of unrestricted funds often simply pours money into a black hole, owing to a lack of either external regulation or internal institutional discipline... Donor restrictions can call institutions... to fulfill their highest ideals."
And if institutions don't like donor restrictions, as philanthropist Charles Bronfman suggested at the conference, all they need to say is no.
Posted by Anne D. Neal on July 21, 2010 at July 21, 2010 02:48 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/782