Missing the Mission | Ego Trips Disguised as Charity
Well-heeled colleges and universities are being scrutinized for their impressive endowments and facing questions about why those funds aren’t used to lower tuition or in the service of underresourced groups. But as Sunday’s New York Times showed, for many schools, gifts come with so many odd qualifications that it can be difficult to them to use the funding to advance their mission in any meaningful way.
Okay, so looking a gift horse in the mouth is something polite people don’t do. But when donors, for whatever eccentric reasoning rattling around in their brains when they sit down to write a check, cannot recognize their goofy directions for what they are, they’re not serving as benefactors — simply as pains in the rear end. It’s one thing to respond to a major gift officer’s request for scratch to fund a specific program or project; it’s quite another to bequest a gift based on personal whim to an area that in short time will be irrelevant. This is not largesse; it is vanity. | 501(c)
Tags: higher education fundraising
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POSTED IN: Charity, Education, Fundraising
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