The Campaign for Dartmouth

DARTMOUTH'S open secret came in from the cold early this month when the Trustees officially announced the start of a $160-million, five-year capital campaign. It is called the Campaign for Dartmouth. The $160-million goal dwarfs the objectives of the College's two previous campaigns - the $17-million Hopkins Center drive in the late 1950s and the $51-million Third Century Fund completed in 1970.

Why another campaign, for much higher stakes, just seven years after the last one? Since the early seventies, inflation and an infirm stock market have combined to pummel Dartmouth's financial ace, its endowment. Ten years ago, endowment revenue provided 22 per cent of Dartmouth's annual budget, but that share has shriveled with the ensuing Wall Street doldrums. In terms of 1976 dollars, the endowment a decade ago was worth almost $230 million while the budget amounted to $46 million. In last year's real dollars, the endowment stood at $163.7 million compared to a budget of almost $60 million. By the early eighties, Dartmouth's gross annual budget probably will approach $100 million, and the College's financial planners see a generous infusion of new endowment funds as the only solution to a potentially ruinous situation.

Adversity has company. At last tally, over 100 American educational institutions were engaged in major fund drives with an aggregate value of a staggering $6.7 billion. (See box.) Yale leads the chart as it pursues a goal of $370 million. Notre Dame seeks $92 million for its endowment in an overall campaign of $130 million. "If you take the ten universities in this country with the largest endowments," Father Hesburgh has explained, "you will likely have the ten best universities in the nation. . . . It's that simple."

The Campaign for Dartmouth has four basic components: $80 million for endowment, $40 million for operating expenses, $16 million for facilities, and $24 million for what is being called the Funds for the Eighties. A kind of halfway point between endowment and current-use money (the kind generated by the Alumni Fund), the Funds for the Eighties call for investing the $24 million for high yield and spending both the yield and the principal in predetermined stages. The aim is to keep the budget balanced in the face of rising costs through the decade of the 1980s.

Most of the College's various divisions have a stake in the $160-million goal. The hard-pressed Medical School, for example, will probably benefit by as much as $25 million. Over $6 million will go to the Hopkins Center for a new art gallery and studios. About $3 million will be spent to improve athletic and recreational facilities. Other categories include $10 million for undergraduate scholarships, $8 million for Tuck School, $5 million for Thayer School, and almost $3 million to put a student center in College Hall and turn Webster Hall into an academic center.

Setting goals is one thing, raising the money quite another. How does Dartmouth plan to find $160 million? One way would be to ask each of 36,000 alumni for a gift of $4,444 - a tidy, if visionary, plan. What the College must actually do is approximately double its charitable gifts from all sources - currently running around $15 million a year to meet the five-year goal of the Campaign for Dartmouth. First of all, every gift and pledge received over the next five years will count toward the Campaign for Dartmouth. This includes the Alumni Fund, targeted at $5 million-plus a year for an overall $26 million for annual expenses. Corporations are expected to provide $10 million, foundations $20 million, with the rest to come from bequests and life income trusts ($25 million), and outrigh! gifts from individuals (almost $80 million). In all, Dartmouth is counting on 270 "major gifts" of $100,000 and up. Even in advance of the official start this month, a "nucleus fund" of over $20 million had been raised from present and former Trustees and overseers of the Medical, Tuck, and Thayer schools.

Planning 'for the campaign began at least two years ago, and as the public announcement drew close, Crosby Hall began to resemble an invasion command post. Lights burned late into the night, meeting flowed into meeting, and phrases like "critical path" appeared on office blackboards. The firm of Brakeley, John Price Jones was retained as campaign consultant, and Dartmouth expanded its own fund-raising staff by 13, some of them to be in charge of regional offices in Boston, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco. John Kemeny's long-range calendar began to fill up with dates for speeches and personal solicitations. His commitments started this month with "kickoff" speeches in Hanover, Boston, and Chicago. In early December, he will meet with the Alumni Council in Hanover to discuss details of the drive. In February, a dinner and another major speech in New York. Not counting time and wear and tear on Kemeny and the College staff, the total fund-raising budget - how much it will cost to raise $160 million in five years - has been figured at roughly $11 million.

The College depends on volunteer alumni service for just about everything it does, from the 4,000 Alumni Fund workers to academic visiting committees, and the Campaign for Dartmouth is no exception. By the time all of the regional committees have been established, probably 2,000 alumni - and some parents of Dartmouth students who are not themselves alumni will be serving the campaign. Several Trustees have been working on it for some time- Norman McCulloch '50 (chairman), Ralph Lazarus '35 (chairman, nucleus fund), David McLaughlin '54 (vice chairman, nucleus fund), William Morton 32 (Medical School), and Richard Lombard '53 (Hopkins Center). When they are not working for Dartmouth, McCulloch is president of Microfibres, a textile firm in Providence, Rhode Island; Lazarus is chairman of Federated Department Stores; and McLaughlin is president of Toro Company. Morton is retired chairman of American Express, Lombard has been head of his own investment firm.

From the elder Wheelock forward, just about every one of Dartmouth's 13 presidents has had to lead the College out of the financial wilderness. (Perhaps only the taciturn Ernest Fox Nichols, president from 1909 to 1916, was content with the status quo.) But will the golden moonbeams continue to shine down on Dartmouth Hall? The director of the campaign, Dartmouth Vice President Addison Winship '42, recognizes the perils littering the critical path - intense competition for the charitable dollar, a possible continued Wall Street decline, keeping interest up (and ennui down) during the long pull of a five-year campaign - but says he is optimistic that just as Dartmouth alumni in the past have supported the College to a degree unsurpassed at other institutions, they will continue to do so in the face of new challenges."

Chairman McCulloch is succinct. "From an educational standpoint, Dartmouth is doing a superb job. But the pressures on the financial side are enormous, and they clearly are going to continue. This is why we are having this campaign _ to maintain financial integrity so that we can retain the educational and intellectual quality of the College. It's a job that has to be done, and I'm absolutely persuaded that we will do it - $160-million worth."

The Top Ten Campaigns (in millions) Yale s370 N.Y.U. 300 Stanford 300 Chicago 280 Pennsylvania 255 Cornell 230 M.I.T. 225 Case Western Reserve 215 Duke 162 Dartmouth 160 (Princeton has just completed a campaign for $125+ million.)

How high the moon