Friday, Sept. 16, 2005 | 11:15 a.m.
You might call it a $500 million celebration.
The marching band played the fight song, fireworks went off and confetti filled the air as UNLV President Carol Harter on Thursday formally announced that the university hopes to wrangle $500 million from private donors in the university's first comprehensive fundraising campaign.
Private giving is essential to improving the school, Harter said during the campaign's grandiose public kick-off in her state-of-the-university address Thursday morning at the Cox Pavilion.
The "Invent the Future" fundraising campaign is to last through June 2008, which will be when UNLV celebrates its 50th anniversary.
The infusion of private dollars is to be spent on building or renovating UNLV facilities, providing endowments and scholarships to bring in better faculty, graduate assistants and students, advancing research endeavors and developing centers of excellence and purchasing library collections and advanced equipment, said Don Snyder, the recently retired president of Boyd Gaming who is chairman of the fundraising campaign.
State dollars have never been able to keep pace with UNLV's explosive growth or its ambition to be a premiere, metropolitan research university.
"A campaign of this magnitude manifests a dream to raise the bar in perpetuity for giving to the university," Harter said. "Future leaders of this university and community will, from this day forward -- just as they have before us -- struggle to find the path to excellence and pre-eminence.
The university is already more than halfway to its goal with the cash and pledges foundation officials collected during the last three years of the campaign's so-called "quiet phase," Harter said. Donors have given $98.8 million in cash and promised another $164.2 million in additional funds since Jan. 1, 2002, officials said. The campaign will target UNLV alumni and faculty and staff as well as the community at large, Harter said. Harter and her husband Michael Harter, vice president for administration at Touro University in Henderson, made a pledge of $50,000 Thursday.
The current tally represents 34,500 individual gifts, John Gallagher, vice president for development, said. The largest is $35 million, but Gallagher said he could not release who made that gift due to donor confidentiality rules.
Three previously named donors have hit or surpassed that amount, but not in any one pledge. Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Jim Rogers has made about $60 million in gifts and pledges to UNLV, the Boyds of Boyd Gaming Corp. have given or pledged more than $34 million and the Greenspun Family Foundation, owners of the Las Vegas Sun, has allocated more than $25 million for the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs alone.
The campaign kick-off earned the applause of the nearly 700 people in attendance as well as endorsements from most of the Board of Regents and Chancellor Jim Rogers, who has been arguing for the need for more private funding since he took office.
"I work at UNR and I'm going to write a check," Regent Howard Rosenberg said. "President Harter did everything but a high wire act."
Overall, state funding makes up about 32 percent of the budget at UNLV when all other revenue sources, including tuition and fees, research grants and contracts, and private giving is factored in, Harter said. State funding covered about 50 percent of the university's operating costs in the early 1990s, Harter said.
In 2003, the most recent year for which comparative data was available, UNLV received $7,345 per full-time student from the state, and those students paid about $2,370 in tuition.
In comparison, the University of California, Los Angeles received $27,904 in state dollars per full-time student, the University of Arizona received $14,294 and the University of Washington received $11,724 in state funding, according to an institutional poll conducted by UNLV.
But across the nation, all state schools are finding that state dollars are not keeping up with growth or inflation, meaning more of their funding has to come from external sources, Harter said.
"It's the way of the world that the private sector must step forward and support our institutions," Snyder said.
UNLV officials first started work on a campaign in 2001, Harter and Snyder said, but an outside consultant's report showed them the university did not have the proper infrastructure or community support to raise the goal then of $250 million. Part of the problem was the severe economic turndown after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The news forced the university and foundation officials to regroup, making several administrative changes such as placing development officers in several of the colleges and beginning the quiet phase of the campaign.
The goal was always to raise at least half of the final total in order to make sure the university "would have the momentum and energy needed to carry them," Snyder said.
The silent phase also involved raising the stakes for what it takes to name an individual college or school after a donor. When the Harrah College of Hotel Administration was named, the company's initial $2 million donation was huge for the university at that time, Snyder said.
Bill Boyd's $5 million donation to the School of Law was similarly unprecedented, Snyder said.
But UNLV officials realized they could never build the university they wanted if they continued to name whole colleges for those amounts, Snyder said. Boyd himself was the one to raise that bar, by adding $25 million to his donation to the law school.
There are 12 other colleges or schools awaiting names for donors willing to give in the $25 million to $40 million range, but there are several smaller naming opportunities for donors with smaller pocketbooks, Snyder said.
Harter and Snyder unveiled an eight-page wish list as part of UNLV's campaign kick-off that includes everything from endowing professorships, scholarships or research programs to establishing laboratory space or supporting a debate team.
The largest project on the list is the INNovation Village, a proposed campus within a campus for the hotel school.
"We calibrated those (the naming opportunities) to appeal to people at different levels," Snyder said.
Even small donations to student scholarships have considerable impact because they can change a life, Snyder said.
"Whether it's three to five million or three to five thousand, we just have to highlight a few things and get people interested," Snyder said. "Passion is what allows people to open their pocketbooks."
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