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by Neil Berkowitz
I’ve lived much of my adult life in error. As a person uncomfortable with costume and pretense, I spent many years insisting on referring to what I did for a living as fundraising. I had always thought that development was a euphemism. I wanted to be more directwith those from whom I was seeking a gift.
But there is an odd thing about fundraising goals: they aren’t about fundraising. They’re about the things fundraising pays for. They are about programs and services, about people and promise.
For our department, this means that our fundraising goals are about things like recruiting, retaining, and supporting valued faculty, attracting the most promising graduate students and preparing them for their future scholarship and teaching, offering opportunity and guidance to undergraduates in addition to instruction, and creating possibilities for a college education in individuals and families where both hope and tuition may seem equally unaffordable.
As we shape our development goals, we can and do get much more specific about just what we want to be able to do. One long term goal is for eight new endowed professorships and an endowed chair, with two professorships to be initiated this biennium. Donors who make gifts for these endowments are investing in the department’s best faculty. A gift of an endowed professorship has an impact on advancing knowledge, giving life to new ideas, and shaping generations of students.
Despite an outstanding reputation, the department has too few fellowships to recruit top students, for whom the competition is fierce. So another goal is one fellowship endowment and five annual fellowship awards ($5,000 each) for graduate student recruitment. Prospective students know that fellowship awards allow them to do their best work and to develop their full potential. Donors who invest in these students have the satisfaction of seeing their gift launch talented and committed students on a path of discovery, creativity, and accomplishment.
It turns out, then, that development is not a euphemism for fundraising after all. When actual fundraising goals are set in terms of professorships, scholarships, and other endowments, development is the fuller, more accurate term. Fundraising is the means. Development—of programs, services, resources— is the end.
In my job I am sometimes not sure if it is fortunate or unfortunate that we state our goals in this way. When looking at specifics of staffing, outreach, and services instead of dollars, the impact of falling short becomes clearer and more ominous. Today this motivates me. So for a moment, let me slip from development into mere fundraising. Please make a gift today and consider the Department of English in your future giving.
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