Most students dread asking their parents to furnish eating club dues or finance a Spring Break trip.
Now imagine asking them to buy you an F-16.
This scenario is not unlike what the University has faced repeatedly during the five-year run of its $1-billion anniversary campaign, asking some alumni to go above and beyond the call of duty in support of Old Nassau.
Vice President and Secretary Thomas Wright '62 illustrated what it is like to approach alumni and ask them, literally, for $40 million.
"One, it's not for me," he said with a laugh. "It's for the University, which is something that's a lot bigger than any one person and involves a lot of good causes."
"And second," he said, President Shapiro has always had "a rule of thumb that a person should feel better after he's made a gift than before he made it. And if the person doesn't feel like they've done something that really makes them feel good, then it's been a mistake to have made the commitment."
"That makes it a lot easier if you know that you're genuinely trying to do something that the person will enjoy doing and feel better for having done afterwards," Wright added.
Success
In his experience, Wright said, "People don't expect sometimes to make as a large a gift as they do. They sort of walk down a road that they hadn't thought they were going to walk down, but at the end of the day, they feel wonderful."
"And so you don't feel awkward, or embarrassed if that's been the case," Wright said. "I mean, if somebody felt afterwards, 'How in the devil did they trick me into this?' or 'Why did I do it?' then you would feel pretty confused about your own role."
But Wright said that has not been his experience. He said that by soliciting the donor for a project he or she "really, really cares about . . . what you've really done is you've brokered a matching up of an opportunity and a capacity in a way that produced an all-around win-win result."
Vice President for Development Van Zandt Williams '65 explained how the University determines which potential donors to ask for these very large — often multi-million-dollar — gifts.
"First of all, everyone gets approached because annual giving reaches all alumni," he said. "This is a situation where it is not a matter of deciding who we're going to approach. We know we're going to go after everybody, and we do."
But "the so-called capital gifts, the things that are not annual giving," Williams continued, "like Mr. Icahn's gift for the genomics center or the Frist family gift for the Frist Campus Center, those are all things that are planned very carefully because these are families where there's obvious evidence that they've got resources beyond the average, and so we arrange for visits by the president and visits by other senior volunteers and convene a carefully thought-out set of conversations to help them come to the happiest possible conclusion."
Justification
Vice President for Finance and Administration Richard Spies GS '72 illustrated how the University justifies asking donors for money when it is already sitting on a more than $7-billion endowment.
"I get that question all the time," he said, " 'Why should I give money to Princeton when you have more endowment per student than anybody, when you have resources that most schools can't even dream about, and there are other schools, other kinds of organizations that are much more needy?' "
"I think you're investing in the quality of the place," Spies said. "You're investing in the quality of the people who come here who will, as they go on to the next stages in their lives, have an unusual effect, a disproportionate effect, because of the qualities they have in themselves, but also because of the education they got here."
"And that will make a difference that goes way beyond those individual people," he added. "So, to invest in the places that really do it at the very high end is beneficial not just to the beneficiaries of [that investment], but to society."
Sometimes, though, Wright said contributions fall through, or donors refuse to give money because of actions taken by the University.
He said it is a disappointing experience for him when the University occasionally runs into a "one-issue voter, who says, 'Well, because the University did this, I'm not going to support the University.' And that can be that 'my child wasn't admitted' or 'so-and-so was appointed professor' or 'this program was discontinued and so I don't care about the University anymore because it didn't do what I wanted it to do or what I think it should have done in this case.' That's a disappointment."
"It really shows that that person's perspective is a very limited and narrow one," Wright said, "and does not encompass the breadth and the richness and the historical perspective that I think support for the University usually reflects."
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